


And Glory Has No End; or, Clementine

by kariye



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Futurefic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-04
Updated: 2012-05-04
Packaged: 2017-11-04 20:21:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/397847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kariye/pseuds/kariye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Futurefic. I would summarize this fic as: where you go, there will I go, and where you lodge, there will I lodge. Not a love song, but a romance. A reader who wants to know what it’s about might prefer: the expedition runs out of energy and has to abandon Atlantis to return to Earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Glory Has No End; or, Clementine

**Author's Note:**

> Repost from LJ.
> 
> All scientific or military inaccuracies are my own, as are all other inaccuracies. Thanks to perverse_idyll for the beta. Tis the season for orange peels and clementines. *kiss*

In the end they promote him. 

This is the way it could have gone down: 

Willful disregard of a direct order. Black mark 2.0. “For god’s sake, Sheppard,” Colonel Carter says, “You held your own men at gunpoint. It wasn’t enough to disobey your orders alone? You had to drag them into this?” She sighs. “I’ll do what I can, but you know how this is going to play out.” Court martial, dishonorable discharge. Maybe Leavenworth. 

“This is not simply a matter of national security here.” Landry’s voice is paper-dry, tight. “This is Earth. Billions of people. Our world. We’re not talking about some outpost in the far reaches of Pegasus. You had orders.” He turns away. “You’re no officer of mine. You’re no soldier of mine. No soldier at all.”

This is the way it does go down:

“Took them long enough.” Rodney bats the fridge door shut behind him, blindly, as he grabs a glass from John’s kitchen cabinet. “You passed your twentieth year fourteen months back. You should have been promoted a long time ago. Colonel Sheppard.” He suddenly looks at John and grins, hard and bright. 

John has to steady himself with a hand on the counter behind him. 

Rodney continues on, unheeding. John’s grateful, even while he’s not. 

“You want to celebrate? We could try out that Japanese place I saw on the way in, catch some classic Who. I’ve even got—” and then he stops. A thousand times John’s seen Rodney’s brain catch up with his mouth like this, and he’s always waiting for the thousand and first time. 

“That is,” he says, awkward now, “if you didn’t already have plans. I guess I – you weren’t expecting me to just show up, were you. I could – do I need to get a hotel room?”

“Don’t be an idiot, McKay.” John watches the set of Rodney’s shoulders yield slightly. “There’s a new microbrewery down the way. Been wanting to try them out. I’ll run over and grab some drinks, pick up some food, and bring it back here while you, I don’t know, shower off your flight or whatever.”

“Powder my nose?” Rodney rolls his eyes. He cocks his head. “Are you even excited about this? Your promotion? Not that it should matter because it’s just a system of judgment passed on you by people who, with a few rare exceptions, are so far from being your peers that it’s not even sad. Just pathetic. The United States Air Force? The IOA? Even the SGC. They’d be useless without us.”

John knows he means the scientists, because, wait for it – yup, here it comes. The familiar rant, only ever a variation, but no less heartfelt. 

“Did you hear that they’re sending Simpson off? Some minor research facility in South Africa. Granted, the woman has her flaws – remember the time she locked herself and Zelenka in that malfunctioning isolation chamber for eight hours? – but at least she’s fully trained.”

Zelenka wouldn’t speak to her for a month after that. “I’m staying out of this,” Elizabeth had said with a mischievous little smile. “Rodney hates it when I interfere with his department, after all.” 

“Still, though,” Rodney catches himself. “They should recognize you, give you the shiny new pin. So that the men below respect you, too. Isn’t that how it works?”

“Full bird,” John murmurs. 

“Once they got their heads out of their asses with that whole” – he gestures, abortive – “Atlantis thing. The puddle jumpers,” and he looks away, maybe because he still thinks it’s his fault about the jumpers, the way that went down; or maybe because he still blames John for the expedition’s larger failure, for being too much of a soldier; or maybe because it just hurts that much, still, for Rodney to say the city’s name. 

“Yeah,” John says, and grabs his keys so that he can buy some beer, as if there’s something to celebrate, as if he doesn’t see this for the punishment that Rodney is apparently blind to. He’ll be chained to a desk forever now, the gene-bearing Colonel too valuable to risk in the killing fields of Earth; the wildcard Colonel who can’t be trusted in an actual position of command, not here at home where it actually matters. He can’t leave, though, even if they’d let him. He needs to know, now, when Rodney isn’t there, which way the wind blows in the underground stillness of the SGC. 

Carter’s kept him in the loop as much as she can. “We can’t do anything until we find another energy source, John, you know that,” she’d said three years ago. That was seven months after they got back, when John first noticed the absent-minded flex of Rodney’s hands, reaching for something that wasn’t there. 

“We just don’t have the resources right now to devote to either ZPM research – it’s too theoretical for us at this point – or to coming up with another way to generate that kind of power.” Two years ago. 

“The compound we brought back from PX4-302 is a bust,” she’d said a year ago, shaking her head. “We can’t get it to remain stable. McKay’s about to fall over. He hasn’t slept in two weeks. We could use you here to help contain the twitch. I think he’s got a new nervous tic.” John almost catches military transport back. He can’t, though, not without raising too many eyebrows that don’t need to be raised. He’s on loan to the Air Force, the larger body that doesn’t know about the SGC. The rocky desert of Afghanistan is almost like an alien planet, and John has the deceptive thought that if only he looked hard enough, he could come up with something, scavenge some living relic of the Ancients to take back to Rodney, to fill up his hands and soothe away his twitches. 

“Truth is, Colonel,” Woolsey tells him on a Thursday six years and four months after they’ve been back, “we’re not going to get back there. Not in our lifetimes. We’ve got our hands full here. Unless you’re going to be the one to build us a new ZPM.”

“You didn’t tell McKay that, did you?” John asks. His innards spasm. 

Woolsey raises an eyebrow. “Dr. McKay, contrary to what some appearances might suggest, is an eminently sensible man. It’s you, Colonel Sheppard, who’s the dreamer.”

John ignores this. “Do you think we left too soon?” He doesn’t really mean this as his question. What he means and can’t say, won’t ever say, is, ‘Did I really bring everyone back with me? Did all of Rodney make it?’ In the end, it had been John and Woolsey up there in his office, Elizabeth’s old, high above the gate. Rodney had left in such a fury that the doors had barely had time to open before him. 

Woolsey answers the question John asked, the only one he can. “I think we followed orders. I think further exploration and war in Pegasus was unsustainable. We did what we had to do.” Woolsey’s gaze is direct and hard, something he learned in Atlantis, but not unkind. “Soldier.” 

+++

When they get back to Earth, it’s winter. They spend a month debriefing, and then anyone who wants it gets several weeks leave. Vacation, for the scientists. They don’t want to let John go. “Jesus,” Rodney explodes. “If he was going to go AWOL, don’t you think he just, oh, wouldn’t have come back through the gate when you ordered him to?” which makes O’Neill rock back on his heels and John want to cringe. O’Neill glances at him. 

In the end, John heads to the mountains, away from the direction of the ocean. It snows, a lot. He’ll probably have to get Caldwell to scoop him out of the cabin with his ship, which is in orbit. 

In the cabin, there’s a woodstove. It heats the place unevenly, slowly, hypnotically. There were no fireplaces on Atlantis, nothing to burn, the city more distant than the intimacy of fire. John pulls an overstuffed old chair – fabric-covered, not one of these modern leather recliners – in front of the woodstove and sits. The windows haven’t been cleaned in a while: there are cobwebs in the corners and dirt smears at odd angles and curves. Dead flies litter the windowsill. He found this place off Craigslist. 

The sun goes down early behind the mountains and a long, slow grey edges in. The glass front of the woodstove flashes red and black, misshapen, as the shadows lengthen and snow drifts sideways outside beyond the death buzz of the sluggish fly beside the window. John wonders if Rodney went to the ocean, if he went anywhere at all. Probably not. He doesn’t really understand things like vacations, taking it easy. John’s not sure, though. Rodney’s avoiding him, blaming him. 

+++

The most important thing is that they stay together. There are the people John has sworn to protect – that would be the people of the United States or maybe the entire world, depending on how one looks at it – and the rest, the others, the people John has already protected. Over the years, he’s discovered a curious thing that still doesn’t completely make sense. If you save someone’s life, he doesn’t owe you. You owe him. You have, with your blood, paid for the lifelong right, privilege, and duty to protect that person. Forevermore. 

This is not the way it worked in his father’s world. “I want you boys to watch carefully,” Patrick Sheppard would tell John and Dave on those rare occasions when he was home to eat dinner with them. “Now today I agreed to extend Mosley’s lease on my West Virginian power lines for another ten years.”

It’s always “I,” never “we.” 

“Bit of a personal favor to Mosley. And he knows it. Electric Grid edged them out on the bidding by a fraction of a percent.”

Dave frowns. “Wouldn’t that add up to quite a lot over ten years?”

Patrick looks at John expectantly. John hooks his leg behind his chair and pushes his food with his fork. “But this way,” he says as Patrick continues waiting, “Mosley, who’s been in this business longer than we have and who has a lot of influence in Washington, is in our debt. Dad’s debt,” he corrects. 

Patrick winks at him. “And yours too, John, someday. Dave,” he says, “Mosley’s company is going through a bit of a tight spot at the moment. I save them now, and he owes me. That’s the way it works.”

John’s blood has splashed every member of the expedition. When Woolsey calls him to his office and tells him to shut the door behind him and hands him his orders, their orders, John finds that he owes every single person in the city to do this right. And so when Rodney says, “Oh, please, you think we’re going to get back to Earth and everyone’s just going to stay at the SGC? That we’re just going to be one happy little expedition there, too?” and stomps away, and Teyla lays her hand on his arm and asks him what he will do, John already knows the answer. 

+++

“Have you ever listened to choral music?” Rodney asks him one day in Atlantis. “The kind that sometimes, especially now, gets sung by women but was really meant to be performed by boys’ voices. Or never really performed at all. Stuff that wasn’t meant to be a show, a display, in a music hall. It was meant to be lived.”

John dangles his feet off the edge of the pier, bare. “Daedalus bring you new music?”

“No,” Rodney exclaims. “Yes. That’s not what I meant, though.”

John shrugs and leans back on his splayed hands. The city’s metal is cool and collected under his palms, blue grey. “Not really to my taste.”

“You can always tell the difference,” says Rodney. “Boys’ voices are clearer. Women’s voices carry this undertone to them, age maybe. That’s why it doesn’t make sense.”

“What doesn’t make sense?” but Rodney’s ignoring John now. 

“If you listen to them in a place with proper acoustics, boys’ voices just float to the ceiling and pool under the arches.”

“Yeah. Listen, McKay.” John slings his arm around Rodney’s shoulder companionably. This is as much as he ever allows himself. “How many you had?”

Rodney glares at him and shoves away. “Fuck off, John.” It’s so out of character for him that John recoils and doesn’t recover quickly enough to do anything but stretch his hand out after him, as if he can grasp in his hand the sound of his footsteps on the city’s back. Later, years later, back in the Milky Way where the only safe thing to fly is a jumper, John feels the echoes of the millennia of Atlantis in them. Where the city was always still – although never completely quiet – under his hands, the jumper is alive, a single, solitary song that he can hear now that the chorus of the city isn’t there to drown out that boyish soprano, clarion in the silence of space. He tries to keep this secret, to keep it from Rodney so that it not break his heart, and John’s too, but Rodney always has a way of finding things out. 

“You hear it?” Rodney says. He’s come back to the states for a consult under the mountain. They wanted him in person. He’s been off on some island in the grey Atlantic, cold, off the coast of Canada, far away from John. “I never understood why everyone referred to the city in the feminine.” He grimaced then. “Also, I always felt a bit like a pedophile for imagining it as a young boy. I had my hands all over it.”

John’s startled into laughter. 

It has to do a lot with choice, it turns out. “There is always a choice, John,” Teyla tells him once. “Often not good choices, choices we would like to make, but not even the Wraith can steal our choice from us.” 

John chose the Air Force. He chose to be a soldier and to touch the sky. He chose Nancy and Holland. He chose Atlantis and Sumner and everyone in the city. The only thing he didn’t choose was the gene, foisted upon him, the one thing Rodney wants most and can only have partially. Away from the city, away from total immersion in its tech, the jumper alone isn’t enough for Rodney, John knows. The city let the brilliance of Rodney’s mind sing. In space, once or twice a year when the SGC lets them take her out, Rodney hears only silence. 

+++

Rodney fell in love once. Really in love. 

Maybe that’s the one other thing a person can’t truly choose. Genes and love. How he reacts to it, yes, if he acts on love or not, yes, but that first headlong fall? Maybe not. 

Rodney fell in love with a city named Atlantis. 

John fell in love once, too.

+++

It could have happened like this:

Earth is quiet now, worn out. John flies over the Rockies toward the coast, following the old zigzag of city lights that are no more. Denver, Salt Lake City, Vegas, L.A. The instruments on the F-302 tell him where the cities should be, where they were. Here and there something winks from the ground, a solitary star. The physical coast of California is the same, the rocks and ocean unchanged, but the bright hum of humanity has gone out. It’s as though the world has been inverted and the sky is the ground, stars – firelight, dying generators – scattered in new constellations to relieve the blackness. 

Rodney’s been awake night and day scavenging naquadah and modifying their machinery so that nothing needs gasoline or electricity. “The oil refineries are all destroyed,” Lorne reported two weeks ago. “First thing they took out – power sources.” John didn’t have any thoughts to spare for his father’s old empire. 

Some surviving general John doesn’t know is supposed to arrive tomorrow. Everyone else is gone, most of them taken out with the ships. Three weeks ago, Rodney shouted at him, “Isn’t this why we left the city, Sheppard? So that they wouldn’t get to Earth with Atlantis defenseless, no ZPMs?” He sprayed another drone with a grey haze of bullets. “I knew we should have moved the city before we went!”

Or it could have happened like this:

Rodney lobs a grenade and manages to take out four Wraith at once. “Did you know this was going to happen?” he screams over his shoulder at John. “Is this why you wanted to go back to Earth when they ordered us a few years ago? Well we’re here now, finally, three years later, and look at all the good we’re doing. Why the hell am I out here fighting when I should be somewhere else figuring out how to send them all to hell? Oh, that’s right,” and sarcasm isn’t as effective when it’s screamed across a battlefield that used to be a strip mall. “It’s too late for that.”

“Jesus Christ, McKay,” John shouts back as he clumsily ties a fabric bandage around his upper arm. “This is not the time for this conversation!” and suddenly Rodney’s breath is hot against his ear, sour with four days of no sleep and too much fear. 

“There might never be another time for it, John,” he grinds out, and John twitches, spins, grabs the front of Rodney’s tac vest, too familiar. “Don’t ever say that again, McKay,” and he’s got a mouthful of words to spit at him, like the bullets and stun blasts peppering past them, only his eyes widen and instead he pushes Rodney away, hisses, “Stay back,” and strides forward with steps that get bigger and bigger until he’s running through the screams of corn husk men and the greenish-red spray of iratus-tinged blood. He crashes into a hard chest, fists forming, weapon forgotten, and he’s the one screaming now, not Rodney, screaming, “Did you do this? Did you bring them here?” and the hands that cradle his head are too resilient to be human, and gentle. 

“I did not, John Sheppard,” Todd tells him, “and I can only save a few. You must choose.” 

John gapes at him. “I can’t.” Blood stings his eye. He blinks. 

Todd watches him calmly. It pisses John off, a hot spark amid the deadening weight of exhaustion. “Have you not already chosen, when you decided to stay on Atlantis instead of returning to your native planet years ago?” He jerks his head at something behind John, and John spins around.

“Rodney,” he says. He’ll never make it to Rodney in time, not before the Wraith encircling him reach their prey, and there’s no way to take them out without taking Rodney out too. Rodney’s eyes are wide and blue, locked onto John’s, the last piece of the sky in a world that’s exploding around them.

“I want him to live.” Todd is right behind him. “I want him to live,” he says with steely determination, and suddenly the drones are backing away from Rodney, and John’s in front of him, dropping to his knees with him in the oil-slick parking lot in the middle of the shards from broken car windows. 

Or it could have happened like this:

Ronon and Teyla left the city three days ago. John’s ribs are still aching from the hug Ronon squeezed from him, and he thinks he has a permanent mark on his forehead from the press of Teyla’s head to his. “I will not say farewell,” she tells him. “Those who have departed us are never truly gone so long as we live to remember them.”

He’s standing with Rodney in front of the open gate. It’s just a few steps to Earth. Behind them, a jumper sits on the gateroom floor. There are five men in there, five men who were supposed to bring back their own jumpers, not be crammed into this one. They’re the last people left in the city. Everyone else has boarded the Daedalus a week ago or stepped through the gate already.

“Do you think it’s a good idea to leave them in there right now?” Rodney says. “You did just threaten to shoot them all if they didn’t disobey Earth’s orders.”

John flicks a glance at the jumper. It sits quietly. “I trust them. That’s why I chose these men to be the ones to fly the jumpers back. Maybe we’d better leave the guns here, though, so that everyone knows I forced them into this. Just in case – I don’t want them getting into trouble over this. They didn’t have anything to do with it. Just kids following orders.”

“That’s why you didn’t let Lorne stay? Because he would have listened to you too, and you didn’t want to risk his career?”

John shrugs, wry. “I’m going to need his support when I get back there, after this. Gotta have someone who didn’t screw up.” 

Rodney grips his arm fiercely. “I’m not going to let that happen, Sheppard. I asked you to do this. It wasn’t your idea. I just can’t – don’t they see that if they take all the jumpers, they’re raping the city? There’ll be nothing left for whoever comes next. I can’t let that happen, John. I can’t. But I’m not going to let you take the fall for it,” and John smiles at him, saying only, “Thanks, McKay,” and knowing that that’s not the way it’s going to go down. 

“Send them through, ahead” Rodney says suddenly. 

The SGA, Earth – they don’t have enough power to dial Atlantis once the gate shuts this time. Rodney’s rigged the gate to shut down at a signal broadcast back through once they’re in the SGC. And once that happens, there are no ZPMs, no alternative energy sources powerful enough to reach across the black of space, to span the stars all the way to the mighty Pegasus. It’s why the expedition has been recalled. Rodney wants to blame it on the IOA, John knows, to find some scapegoat, some idiot to blast with all the fury of his love for the city. Rodney wants to sing the city electric, to wrap himself into it and never leave. If the city were a Wraith ship, he’d be burrowed into the membranes and webbing, part of the living organism. 

But it’s nothing so easy. There’s no one to blame, because the IOA is only doing what’s necessary – the city cannot support an expedition without any power source, with a ZPM that’s at less than 3% – and a person, well, a person’s hardly going to blame himself for falling in love. 

John doesn’t know why Rodney wants him to send the jumper through the gate, leaving him and Rodney to follow on foot instead of gliding out of Atlantis one last time. What do two seconds longer in the city matter? But Rodney wants him to do it, so he does. The same way Rodney came to him two weeks ago and said, “I can’t let them strip the city. Will you help me? Leave the jumpers here, except one or two?”

So John nods at Mathison through the viewscreen in the front of the jumper, and Mathison stands, salutes, and slides into the pilot’s chair. The jumper hovers for a moment, and then disappears noiselessly. 

The city is still. John looks at Rodney. Rodney says, “Stay. Let’s stay,” and John thinks about Mathison’s crisp farewell salute and realizes his own men knew the answer before the question was ever asked.

+++

It could have happened all those ways. But it didn’t. This is the way it goes down:

Ronon and Teyla left the city three days ago. John’s ribs are still aching from the hug Ronon squeezed from him, and he thinks he has a permanent mark on his forehead from the press of Teyla’s head to his. “I will not say farewell,” she tells him. “Those who have departed us are never truly gone so long as we live to remember them.”

He’s standing with Rodney in front of the open gate. Behind them, a jumper sits on the gateroom floor. There are five men in there who were each supposed to fly a jumper back to Earth so that Earth would have them in her fight against – well, the galaxy. 

Rodney asks him if it was a good idea to step outside of the jumper. “You did just threaten to shoot them all if they didn’t disobey Earth’s orders.”

“I trust them,” John says. 

“I should have been quicker.” Rodney shakes his head. “There must have been some more time, somewhere, that I could have used to work on ZPM research. Figured out a way to make new ones and avoided all this. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

“I know, buddy.” John waits. “You ready?”

Rodney looks up at the dark city behind the jumper. “Yes. When we get through the gate, I’ll just – one press of the button and the gate’ll shut down on this end. John,” he says. “I’m not going to let you take the fall for this one, for disobeying the order to bring back the extra jumpers. I was the one who asked you not to do it.”

“Thanks, McKay,” John says, and doesn’t add that he’s the expendable one, not Rodney. He knew what he was doing when he let Rodney persuade him.

“I’m –” Rodney begins, but John cuts him off. 

“No, you’re not. Don’t say it. You’re not sorry, so don’t pretend you are.” He pats Rodney clumsily on the back. “My choice,” and again he doesn’t add what wants to come out next: but please, Rodney, don’t ask more because I might give it to you, and maybe you know that. Do you know that? Don’t ask me to stay, don’t make me go that far.

Rodney opens his mouth and says, “We could—” and John stares at him, unblinking, and Rodney says, “Let’s get in the jumper and go.”

+++

John’s spent the last five Christmases with the Millers. This one’s no different. Madison’s fourteen now, and is every year more terrifyingly teenagerish. Her body is curving in ways that startle John every time he hugs her. She’s still a scrawny thing, and maybe she’ll stay that way, like Kaleb, but there’s just as strong a chance she’ll turn lush and firm, like Jeannie and Rodney. 

“Hey, Uncle John,” she says when she opens the door. “Uncle Rodney’s not here yet.”

The kid knows him too well, not that John was going to actually ask the question. But since she’s started it –

“When’s he supposed to here?”

“Two days ago.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “Mom’s going to let him have it when he shows up. He promised after Thanksgiving.”

John puts his bag down by the door and takes off his shoes because that’s what Jeannie likes. “What happened at Thanksgiving?”

“He didn’t come at all. He called us the day after and said he’d forgotten.”

This makes John smile ruefully. “Yeah, well.” A pit sinks into his belly at the thought of Rodney missing Christmas as well. He only sees him several times a year as it is. This is the one time when he’s supposed to be assured of a few days with him.

“I know.” Madison rolls her eyes the exact same Rodney always did. Then she tips her head and considers him. “Uncle John?”

John tries not to edge away. He’s got a bad feeling about this. “Uhm, yes?”

“I have to go Christmas shopping. You know, for Mom and Dad. I thought maybe you could take me.”

John thinks about the mall on December 23. “You waited until the last minute?” He holds back a groan and instead tweaks her nose, which makes her glare. “That doesn’t sound like the Maddie I know.” Madison is very organized, the type of kid who puts her school assignments into her phone the instant the teacher hands them out. 

“Well,” she says, and her eyes get bigger. “My friend Taylor—”

“Madison,” Jeannie yells out from the kitchen. “At least let the poor man get out of the hallway before you jump all over him!” There’s a small crash from the direction of the kitchen and then a moment of complete silence. “Hi, John,” she says, popping her head around the corner and smiling sweetly at him. 

“Hi,” John is saying back, even as Madison plants herself in his path again. “So my friend Taylor? She kinda needs to do some shopping too,” and doesn’t this scene just get better and better, two teenagers out two days before Christmas.

“And also, she saw that picture of you Mom has up in the living room and she thinks you’re totally hot.”

John stares at her. 

“Oh, that was what she said. I was like, eww, that’s my Uncle John. I mean, that’s gross.” She claps her hand over her mouth. “No offense. You know I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sure you’re very, uh, very—” She makes some sort of weird, all-encompassing McKay hand gesture. “For, like, someone who’s older than Dad.”

“Hey, John.” Kaleb mercifully appears and shakes his hand. “You look like a man who could use a beer.”

+++

That night, John sleeps in the room he usually shares with Rodney. There’s a cot and an old couch in there, lumpy, a cozy den of sorts. Jeannie always offers him the newer sofa in the living room, but he doesn’t want to take up any more space than he has to. Rodney snorts at this and tells him he’s being ridiculous, but he never kicks John out of the den. “If you want to sleep on a lumpy sofa, that’s your business. This cot is bad enough. Someday I’ll stop coming here and this will be why.” He shouts the last after Jeannie as she lugs a hamper down the hallway, pausing only to flip him off cheerfully. 

The room doesn’t have anything of Rodney’s in it. It doesn’t smell like him. There’s no faint snuffle from five feet away, no whisper from the sheets on the cot. In the pit of his belly, worry gathers and twists, familiar. Whatever this thing is that Rodney’s working on, it’s beginning to consume him. Or maybe it always did, from the start, only he was more careful and better at hiding it. When John asks about it, Rodney’s face becomes shuttered. The first time he said, “How did you know that—” before he cuts himself off. 

“That you’re working on some secret project?” John pins him with a look. “Rodney, I’m out of favor with the brass, not blind and deaf. Or stupid.”

Rodney stares at him for a long moment, his mouth working as if to say something, a thousand expressions flitting across his face – and for a moment, John feels expectation surge out of his gut, come on, Rodney, come on – before Rodney turns away. “It doesn’t concern you, Colonel,” and John has to turn away too so that Rodney doesn’t see his face, surely sucked-in and hollow.

Jeannie’s den contains nothing of Rodney tonight. John falls asleep right away anyhow. 

+++

Last year, Rodney brought someone with him for Christmas dinner. She only came for the afternoon. Her name was Lila, and she was perfectly pleasant, just a little messy, and, no surprise, worked at a university. Madison hated her instantly, which is why John agrees to take her and Taylor, who thinks he’s “hot,” shopping this year. 

Lila kept resting her hand on Rodney’s upper arm, cotton-covered, his sweater hiding the curve that John has long wanted to rest his mouth against, his teeth. The adults had a few drinks before sitting down to dinner. Lila tells them about her work – something do to with computers and robotic technologies, John’s not really listening, too busy seeking out the small changes in Rodney since the last time he saw him five months ago. An extra pound or two, a new line at the edge of his mouth. John has to memorize it all: the small involuntary tick under the skin on the back of Rodney’s hand where the veins puff blue, where John wants to press his finger just to still his own helplessness. 

This was always going to happen. Didn’t Rodney warn him five years ago, back on Atlantis? “Nothing stays the same, Sheppard. Do you really think that we’re going to get back to Earth and somehow the entire expedition will just stay together? Is that how you think it’s going to work, soldier?” He sneers the last because Rodney’s always disdained what he doesn’t understand, and John turns away. 

“I have my orders, McKay.”

“Oh, please. You don’t give a damn about your orders. Not once in the seven years I’ve known you have you let orders get in the way of doing what you thought was right.”

John spins around and with two quick steps crosses the line into Rodney’s space, crowds him into Atlantis’s wall. “That’s right.” His voice is low and deliberate. “And I will not let my people sit in a city with no defenses, waiting every day to see if today will be day that last half percent gets sucked out of the ZPM. I will not ask them to hang around for the Wraith or Replicators. I won’t ask them to starve or be cold or sick because we don’t even have the power to turn the lights on. You said it yourself, McKay. At our current rates of consumption, our tank’s going to be empty in just over four months. And if we – if you want to preserve the city at all, then we have to fly it to a new hidden location and sink it, and we need the rest of the juice in the ZPM for that. And for the shields once we sink it. Not to sit here and wither away.” 

He sighs and rests his forehead against the wall over Rodney’s shoulder, breathing in the smell of him, clean fabric and skin and the faint metallic tinge of the city that’s always gathered to Rodney. This is as close as he allows himself, not touching, too intimate, utterly unavoidable. “No city’s worth that, Rodney. No place, no thing.” He mumbles into the space between Rodney’s shoulder and the wall. 

So now, five years later, he sits in Rodney’s sister’s home on Christmas because Rodney was right, the expedition has been scattered among the continents and oceans of the world, and the byways of this milky swatch of stars. And John’s too old and tired, still too much in love with them all, and not the least this man sitting on a couch with his thigh pressed against Lila’s, to let them go. To form a new tribe. At dinner, he carefully eats his not-turkey and almost feels like he’s back on Atlantis eating other not-Earth food, except for the part where this is nothing like that. 

“Rodney tells me you’re a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force, John,” Lila says, trying to engage him. 

“Yup. I fly things.” He gives her the party line. Somewhere along the way, that became true. 

“John can fly anything,” Rodney tells the table at large. 

Lila smiles gamely. “So you guys have known each other for a long time, it seems. How did you meet?”

This is about the point when John begins to feel sorry for her. Later, standing on the front step with John, she says, “I’ve never seen him like he is today with his family. There’s something … more to him than his usual bite.” The look in her eyes is hungry. John sympathizes. 

“I’ve been dating him for nearly five months, and I barely know him. He talks and talks, about himself mostly, but I don’t know anything about him.”

She never will, either. Not when Rodney can’t tell her about the things that are most important to him, about a great shining city under the waters. “Uh,” John says to Lila, just as he does to Keller four years earlier, “I don’t know if I’m the right person to talk to about this.”

Keller’s expression is frustrated, a little grumpy, and yet still sweet somehow. “Too bad, Sheppard. I don’t have anyone else. It’s just – it’s not working, is it.” Her shoulders slump. “I wanted it to work. After Atlantis, after – everything. I think he – I don’t know. It’s like Ronon’s there between us, because we left and Ronon stayed, and Rodney doesn’t know what would have happened if we’d stayed too, or if Ronon had come with us.”

John rubs the back of his neck. “That thing with you and Rodney and Ronon went on for almost two years. I didn’t think you were serious about either of them.”

“I wasn’t toying with them!”

“I didn’t say you were. I meant that if something goes on that long, it’s probably not going anywhere. It seemed like more of a game between you guys toward the end.”

A dangerous game, one that always left John’s breath clawing at his throat. Lila’s one thing, no threat, but Jennifer, Jennifer who shared the city with Rodney – 

“I guess it was,” she says. “Something lighthearted, something to tease each other with. And then we got back and it all changed. Everything changed. I – I needed something to hold onto. I think Rodney felt the same way.”

They’d dated on and off for a year after leaving Atlantis, which was mostly a time when Rodney and John weren’t speaking very much. John knew that Rodney blamed him losing the city, for walking away from it, for sinking it back under the ocean, deep brown-grey.

“I have dreams about it sometimes,” Rodney confides. “Like I’m the city looking out. And there’s all this stuff touching me, drowning me. It’s not clear down there. There’s no light, and it should be black but it’s murky, the color of an old photograph, and I look up and up and I can’t see anything.” 

“I’m sorry,” John says, lying, at the exact same time Rodney bursts out with, “But I wish you’d stop blaming me. I had to do it, John, you know that. And I’m sorry for the way they’re treating you, like you’re a pariah, no one in the SGC even brave enough to talk to you except SG-1, these stupid debriefings they won’t let go of, maybe a court martial if they’d ever make up their minds. They already took so much tech from the city, so many little pieces, and that’s fine because at least I get to work on them, but they wanted to strip it bare and then what would be left? I couldn’t be a Wraith, don’t you see, sucking out everything vital from the city.”

John’s gut clenches. “Don’t be an ass, McKay. I’m not the one blaming anyone here. We did what we had to do. You’re the one who’s barely spoken to me since we got back a year ago. What the fuck is that about?” His voice is too loud, but he can’t help it. 

“Me?” Rodney yelps, red-faced. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not mad at you. I never was. And you’re not mad at me, apparently. So why are we yelling at each other?”

“I don’t know,” John shouts back. His fists are clenched.

He stares at Rodney. Rodney stares back. “Sheppard, I swear, sometimes you make me want to hit you This – this, you see? You drive me to physical violence!”

John chokes on his laugh and bumps his shoulder into Rodney’s. “How’s it going with Keller?” He asks not because he wants to know, but because he has to. 

“I don’t know,” Rodney says. “I really wanted that to work out, but it’s like there’s something hanging between us. We can’t –”

“Yeah,” John says. Later when Keller tells him that she was really hopeful about it that time around, he nods. “So was Rodney. But, you know, I’m not sure I’m the best person to be talking to about this.” 

Keller eyes him with a little too much knowledge. “Too bad, Colonel. There’s no one else.” 

Lila looks at him apologetically. “I just – you seem like you’re pretty good friends. Spending Christmas with his family and all. There’s something so – Rodney’s got this spark to him. It’s buried a lot, under something he misses. But still. It’s this piece of life that, I don’t know, moth to the lamp, you know? He’s so alive.”

John even kisses her cheek before she gets in her car and drives away from the Millers’ house that evening. She won’t be back next Christmas. 

“Hey, Rodney,” he says to the man standing at his shoulder, hand still raised in farewell to Lila. “I hear you spent the last four months on the Daedalus.” John hated that, hated Rodney being in a place where John couldn’t reach or stand guard. He didn’t protest as much as he wanted to, though, because Rodney needed that. He needed to feel the living weight of the ship’s systems coming together in star-flight, a weak semblance of his Ancient city. They say that after a person loses an arm or leg, he can still feel it. Phantom pain and phantom sensation borne from too-real need, too-real love. John’s not sure how Rodney functions without all of his limbs attached. 

“How’s Caldwell doing?” 

+++

It could have ended up like this:

Ronon’s reflexes are too quick for Earth. They keep him on one of the gate-teams, SG-9, because if he doesn’t get off-world where his eyes and ears can track suns and moons, stars and light, wind and dirt and crushed plants, he goes a bit mad. He jumps at shadows in corners, his blaster drawn before anyone else has even turned her head. On Earth, he finds danger where there is none, enemies visible only in his memories.

“PTSD,” the doctors at the SGC say. “Physically there’s nothing wrong with him. No bacteria, no viruses, nothing that could explain why he’s acting this way.”

Rodney looks like he’s going to explode. “Try a lifetime of being hunted like an animal. Of knowing that any moment the sky is going to open and suck your life out of your chest. And you wonder why he’s on edge?”

Keller shakes her head, later, when it’s just Teyla and John and Rodney. “The only thing we can do is keep him active.”

“I track Wraith,” Ronon tells them, his team. “That’s what I do.”

He’s lost without them, a weird symbiosis that makes Rodney grind his teeth and Teyla close her eyes. “Meditation?” John suggests weakly. This is John’s fault. He brought him here. Rodney throws him a disgusted look, nearly pokes him in the eye with his finger as he says, “And so help me, Sheppard, if you get a complex about this, too, I will devise a hundred surefire ways to kill you in your sleep before you can even blink,” before striding from the room.

But for Teyla, it could have ended up different:

It’s not that she doesn’t miss her people, the few that are left after Michael. “I have never known what this could be like, John.” They watch Torren play in the sand next to a slide. It’s a Saturday morning, and children are climbing like monkeys all over the park’s playground. “Look at them,” she says, gesturing with her chin at the parents. “All those men and women. Your people are so young, so innocent. When you first arrived in Atlantis, I thought you were naïve and foolish. But you’re just like children, thinking you can win against the world, sometimes, and here – that’s my son out there. Safe, a child. He’s going to have a childhood, John.”

She relaxes. Her smile becomes broader, open-mouthed with a ringing laugh that John never heard for the first seven years they knew each other. She learns to throw back her head and let her teeth shine white and happy, let her hair give in to its desire to curl and riot, and even when she mourns, it is not without abiding joy. 

It doesn’t end up like that, though. 

Instead, John composes letters in his head he will never send to Ronon and Teyla. Letters that say: 

Hey guys, what’s up? Lorne was off-world the other day and came back with a knife that really reminded me of you. Ronon, I mean. Teyla, how’s Torren doing? Almost four now, right? I can’t believe we’re going to miss his birthday. We made the last one by about a week. Sorry, Teyla. Oh, Jeannie says hi. Saw her a few weeks ago. Had Christmas with McKay’s family. You know he and Jennifer are kind of dating. Wait, is that something I’m not supposed to say? Ronon, you don’t mind, do you? He should be happy.

and

They gave Carter her own ship today. They’re calling it the Fortuna. Subtlety was never the IOA’s strongpoint. Sam took us for a spin on it. It was good to see Rodney. And good to be in space. I haven’t been out there in ages. I guess you could say I’m a special consultant or something – I don’t have a gate team of my own, but sometimes they send me along when they think my expertise might be needed. I’m not sure what expertise that is.

and

Rodney’s unhappy. You know how he gets that look, how he draws in on himself and takes up less room? That. McKay shouldn’t be small, Jesus. 

and, immediately after

He misses Atlantis. Fucking pisses me off. I’m standing right here.

and

Did I ever tell you guys why I joined the Air Force? Betcha thought it was to fly. 

and

You don’t know this because you were already gone when it happened, but maybe you suspected. Hoped? I don’t think you would hope – you know us too well. I couldn’t have stayed. He almost asked me to stay. At the very end, when I wouldn’t let my men take any more jumpers back to Earth other than the two we’d already sent through and the one I was going to fly. McKay’s not a very – I don’t know – he’s not lenient. But I learned that day that he knows something about mercy, even if he doesn’t want to. Mercy. 

He’s got this vision, I know it. He doesn’t talk about it. But that’s why he wouldn’t let Earth have all the jumpers. He was afraid to strip the city bare because he thinks that someday it’ll be rediscovered, maybe by us, the Tauri, we children of foreign stars as you’d say, Teyla. Maybe by someone else. He thinks the city’s going to rise in glory that has no end. Myself, I’d take something less, some other kind of glory. It was never about Atlantis for me. He still doesn’t get that, I don’t think. Thinks that I’m the one with this special connection to the city. But I never chose that. It was chosen for me, my gene, and I can’t love something that I had no choice in. But he chose it. 

Sometimes he hates me for it – he found out the other day that when I fly the jumper, even here in the Milky Way, I can hear the city, some faint echo of her. He also doesn’t like it when I call it a her. I tried to hide it. No point in hurting him like that, and even though he tried to cover it up, you know his face doesn’t hide much. So I get the one thing he can’t have, that I don’t even want, and he’s, well. Maybe everyone’s got something they want and can’t have. 

We had this enormous fight that day, up in the jumper. It was supposed to be good. The SGC never lets us play with the jumpers, and I’d be okay with that if I got to fly other things more often. I don’t know what they think I’m going to do, fly away or something – how far would I get, honestly – if they give me a plane. It’s been worse since they promoted me. Rodney thought it was a good thing, that they were finally giving me my due, and I suppose they were. Just not the way he thinks. I couldn’t tell him that, though. I’m chained to a desk now. How many colonels can you have out in the field, after all? Colonels in the SGC command gate teams or battle cruisers or entire programs. I told McKay they’d give me a posting when one opened up, just to pacify him. Maybe they even will. So anyway, we had this fight over my genes of all things. My fucked-up gene cocktail, he calls it. Between the ATA gene and the retrovirus Carson gave me and that thing I picked up on M3X-933 about a year before we left. I think he suspects the fevers are coming back. 

and

I try to keep my eye on all of them, the scientists and the marines, but they’re all over the place now. Lost Suarez last week in Iraq of all places. Nearly put my hand through the wall over that – what a waste, still there. Zelenka’s left the SGC. He’s been reassigned. Novak – the hiccuppy lady who used to work with Hermiod on the Daedalus – okay, this is just weird. She’s getting married to Kavanagh. Rodney spent a few months up there recently, his second time up, and came back bug-eyed over the whole thing. Turns out she was in love with Hermiod, and then when they all up and did their Asgard thing, things were rough. She swears Kavanagh is a good guy, under all the insecurity. I don’t know that I’d want my own ship, even if they’d give it to me. Fuck, who am I fooling. I don’t care about the ship, all the things it can do – Rodney has wet dreams over Sam’s new one, I swear – but the people on a ship, the crew, they’re tight. Like Atlantis was. Caldwell had some prisoners onboard that he was transporting and they got loose and killed two members of his crew. Rodney says he nearly spaced them all. I would have. But you know Caldwell. The most by-the-book tightass there is, and a good man. We’re both colonels now. He always salutes me when our paths cross. Doesn’t have to. Maybe he didn’t get it before, about what’s really important and what’s not. But I think he does now. 

and

I visited Rodney on his island last week. The beach is rocky and dull, and the water, the way the entire north Atlantic is, is choppy and grey. Lots of wind, cold even in September. But it rained, the way it does when half the sky is stormy and the other half is blue and sunny, and there was a rainbow. 

He’s working on something there and won’t say what. That’s why he quit the Stargate Program, I think. 

and

Did I ever tell you that I got shipped back to the Middle East a few years ago? About three years after we got back here. I thought that of everyone, at least I’d be near Rodney. But he was all over the place – he and Carter, the most demanded people on Earth – and then I would turn around to say something to him and he wasn’t there. He was under the Mountain, and that was when I wasn’t, right after we got back. I’m surprised I wasn’t locked away somewhere in those days. Then he went back to Area 51 for about two years before coming back to the SGC for a few months, which was great, only that was when I was sent off to the Middle East as some sort of weird liaison for a year. In some ways, that was the best year. Since Atlantis, maybe even Antarctica. The feel of good, old solid machinery winging me to heaven. Jesus, it makes me soppy. That was the same year the fevers started, just one that first year. My first since before we’d left Atlantis after Keller cleared me. Then I was back, but Rodney was gone again, off to various research and military installations around the world, sometimes out on the Daedalus or the Fortuna for months. 

Carter told me that he’d cut his hours back to what was basically a normal 9-to-5 job. Apparently he was already working on something then. The SGC let him get away with it because they were afraid they’d lose him altogether if they tried to hold on any tighter. Which was oddly good sense for them, and I think Carter had something to do with it, because her mouth curled up in that friendly, sly way it sometimes does. She wields a lot of influence these days. She’ll make general someday. 

and

Possession is when you exist as if you are only a creation of someone else’s mind, as if you don’t exist outside the sphere of his contentment and pleasure and whim. Even if he doesn’t know it.

and

I was always afraid of not being the man you thought I was, or the man you needed me to be.

and

Torren’s ten now. Happy birthday, kid.

and

I miss you both.

+++

It’s easier to say things to people who can’t hear. If he ever sees Teyla and Ronon again, he’s not going to be able to look them in the eye. He won’t be able to remember what he has and hasn’t told them, in reality.

+++

Later, at the very end almost, Rodney turns to him with an expression John’s only ever seen once or twice before. He saw it when they lost Elizabeth and in the instant before the Arcturus Project blew, and he saw it once here on Earth, a few years ago when Rodney found out about John’s fevers, right before he blistered the skin off John’s back with the fire of his anger. Uncertainty is not a good look for Rodney. 

“I—” he says, “You do, you do want—”

Soldier closes his eyes and steadies himself. “I need this,” John agrees, sure and firm, lying with a lie that’s not really a lie, after all, because this is Rodney asking. 

+++

John was groomed for business. He wasn’t supposed to go into the Air Force. Looking back, things are conflated, topsy-turvy. He doesn’t think he joined the Air Force to fly; he thinks that’s just the lie that turned into the truth after being told enough times. When he was young, he looked to the sky not to chase planes but because he was convinced that there had to be more. Somewhere out there beyond the rolling hills of Virginia and the desert brush of Southern California – he knew there was something else. 

The inside of his father’s house, houses, was always cool. As if all the dark, heavy furnishings would draw out the heat from the radiators, stealing it because there were no people to soak it up and bask in it. Patrick Sheppard was a man of “I,” never “we,” isolated by wealth and privilege, not allowed to be human lest someone take advantage and the company stock go down. 

The Air Force promises John that he won’t be alone, that there will always be a man at his back, that he’ll have a place. 

So maybe he joined to fly. Or maybe he joined to feel a warmth that when he’s young he calls promise. And maybe this is why he becomes a solider: because promise means protecting his people. It means doing the right thing, duty regardless of his heart, duty always subject to his heart, and it’s just his luck that his heart is contrary and gets pulled in all directions, just like his mother warned him.

She didn’t touch the earth. “‘John,’” she said, “is like the name Mary. I wanted to name you Clementine, but Patrick wouldn’t let me. He said it was a girl’s name, which I think he might be right about.” She laughed lightly and wound up the old pewter music box sitting on her dresser. “He said it wasn’t fitting. Wasn’t solid. Are you solid, John?”

This probably isn’t what she really said; John wasn’t more than seven when this happened. This is what he remembers. The music box is seducing him in one direction, a nameless tune that he hears in his sleep and wakes up tapping on his mattress, a light tinkle like fairy’s feet and rain on a fretting iron ocean. His mother’s humming pulls him the other way, a conspiratorial smile playing on her lips as she sings, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?”

John was a cheerful if quiet child. Not a Mistress Mary at all, and his mother’s mouth would twist whenever she heard him humming with his light boy’s voice, under his breath. 

He supposes that if he had any sense, Atlantis would have been it. That moment when he sat down in the chair under the ice in Antarctica was meant to be where his life was heading. Everyone else certainly thinks so. 

“Uncanny connection with the city,” Elizabeth said.  
“She likes you best, after all,” Radek pointed out.  
“And how did you feel, being away from Atlantis for those six weeks when the Ancients kicked us out?” Heightmeyer asked, delicately stressing “feel.”  
“Do we need to watch him?” Jackson says after they get back, not quite softly enough for John to avoid overhearing. “For some sort of withdrawal?” To which Rodney snaps, “It’s not a drug, for crying out loud!”

Rodney comes to him nine years after they’ve been back on Earth and says, “John, I need to take apart one of the jumpers for something I’m working on.” Outside the wind is blowing.

John stares at him, confused. “Are you asking my permission? Because I don’t think I’m the one you need to ask. Try Landry. I doubt he’s going to let you, though.” He doesn’t ask what Rodney’s project is. He’s learned the hard way that Rodney won’t answer, and while John is perfectly happy to be ignored by just about every person on this planet and even wishes that a certain few people would do just that, mostly his superiors, he hates being ignored by Rodney. 

“I’ll manage them.” Rodney doesn’t sound like he has any concerns on that score. “I just didn’t want you to freak out if you stumble on one in pieces.” His face twists as he says this, unhappy. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to put it back together. If everything goes right, probably not.” 

John props his leg up on the coffee table in the center of his living room and tells Rodney that he’ll restrain himself from flipping over a broken jumper. He’s not sure Rodney will be able to do the same. Eyeballing him, he swipes Rodney’s almost empty cup of coffee, cold now. It’s not often that Rodney goes so far as to forget coffee, but Earth is making his hands clutch less. He’s learning to take some things for granted once again. John sees this mirror in himself.

“Hey,” Rodney says. “That’s mine.”

“You weren’t drinking it.” John finishes it off. It doesn’t have enough milk in it and is bitter against his tongue. “Thought you were finished.”

Rodney regards him balefully. “Colonel. It was coffee. I am never finished with my coffee until I am finished with my coffee.” 

“Well,” John says, and he smacks his lips against the annoying “p” sound he tacks on. “Looks like you’re done now.” He sprawls back into the cushions. “It was cold anyway. Cold coffee sucks. You’d be better off making a new pot.”

“What a thoughtful suggestion, Sheppard.”

“I try to help,” John says modestly as he sprawls back into the couch cushions and eyeballs Rodney’s weekend luggage across the room, satisfied. “I’d go with hazelnut. I don’t really care for Kona very much.”

Rodney’s face is slowly turning red. “You – I am most certainly not going to cater to your coffee wishes, you – you coffee-thieving thief!”

“Hey, that’s okay. I’m more of a tea person anyway,” John says, and “Rodney. Are you okay? You seem a little flustered.”

He watches Rodney take a steadying breath before he says, overly calm, “I’m fine, Colonel. It’s just that you stole my cup of coffee. You do not go around stealing a man’s coffee. I thought you knew this. If you knew nothing else, you knew this. I have junior scientists who are better trained than you.”

“Oh,” says John. “I’m sorry.” And he’s about to say something really stupid, maybe like, “Let me make it up to you,” when Rodney steals a couch pillow out from behind him and whacks the back of his head with it. Which, really, means war, John’s not ashamed to admit. Not when it’s Rodney. 

+++

Years ago on Atlantis, a year and one month before they left, John’s team had a mission to M3X-933. It was harvest season there, the sun fading to coolness in the evening. The Menaxos roast knobby gourds with game and offer the dish to the team. Vines, starting to shrivel and turn brown, twine up wooden lattices and wrap together over their heads. 

John has no reason to stay there that night, nor does anyone else on the team except that there doesn’t seem to be any danger and comets are passing high overhead, streaking the night sky, and the Menaxos take this as a good omen. John’s comfortable by the fire with Rodney’s leg bent against his, careless, as Rodney taps at his laptop. Ronon’s at his back in a posture that almost resembles relaxation, and Teyla’s nodding her head at Belua’s story of the origins of their world. It had to do with comets, apparently. 

The uneven heat of the fire, so familiar in Pegagus with its small cultures constantly herded by the Wraith, makes John’s bones loosen. His left side, tilted slightly closer to the heat, becomes lazy and drooping, and his eyes grow heavy, too. A year and some from now, sitting in front of the woodstove in his rented cabin in the mountains of Colorado, he’ll think of this moment, a small catch of perfection. He flexes his leg against Rodney’s for just a second’s more space of body-to-body that Rodney doesn’t pay any attention to. 

The crackle of the fire is like an old record player or like the sound of a radio on a Sunday morning when it plays Big Band or Swing, recordings unremastered, left with all their texture. Sometimes on Sundays eleven years later, John gets Rodney to stop working, to cast off for just a few hours his feverish pace. By that point he’s moved in with Rodney up on his rocky Atlantic island. The radio is always fuzzy, at least the old FM bands that still broadcast. The wind and the sea, the salt – John imagines these things leaping into the air, binding themselves to the radio waves so that by the time they reach their destination, intercepted by Rodney’s old unit, they have to shake themselves free to be heard. The static and crackle are the sounds of salt crystals falling, of the wind nipping one last time before casting itself back into the noisy spray that crashes against the black rock of the shore. 

Rodney, of course, has satellite, but on Sundays John won’t let him listen to it. He likes the hiss of imperfection given to the radio waves. He’s taken over Rodney’s guest bedroom. He couldn’t bear to see Rodney’s face growing ever longer and more pensive as time passed. He felt trapped in John’s apartment.

“You don’t have to stay,” John tells him the first time Rodney shows up during a fever, after it’s broken. “In fact, I wish you wouldn’t because you’re driving me nuts. I’m fine. I have been fine for years, and I will be fine for years. That was just a bad episode, is all.” He laughs. “No offense, McKay, but you’re really not cut out to be my nursemaid. Not that I need one.”

Rodney glares at him. “Shut up. You don’t get a say in this. You lost that when, huh, let’s see. What’s it been, two years?” He watches John’s face. “Three. No, four. Goddammit, John, if you tell me it’s been five years since you had the first fever, I will snap your overgrown balls of steel off and feed them to the alligators. Now I am going to ask you a question and you are going to tell me the truth. How often?”

There’s this small, tight part of John that’s glad to have Rodney here. Both to have him here with John and to keep him away from the project that increasingly consumes him. Rodney’s attention, although terrifying, is a drugging thing. It’s the snap of a new fire and the laze of an old, making John edge ever closer, and this is the unremembered lassitude of his fevers. When he wakes up, he remembers only being cold, being hot, but Rodney tells him that he lay there like a thing paralyzed with only the sharp punctuation of a series of spasms on and off for four days, except for when he tried to get up. It’s ridiculous, though, isn’t it, for John to be jealous of Rodney’s time and attention. It was never his to begin with. 

Rodney stays long after John’s perfectly fine again. For a week after the fever breaks, he doesn’t speak to John except to threaten to call Keller. “You know we can’t,” John says, and a little thrill goes through him as he says “we,” as it does every time he and Rodney become complicit. 

“But it’s Keller,” Rodney protests. “She’s safe.”

John shakes his head. “On her own, sure. But she’d have to tell someone.”

Rodney’s face tightens. “I have to hurry up, then.” For a moment, his face is so sad that it ages ten years in a second’s span and John finds his hand stretched out between them, hovering over the kitchen table, before he’s even aware of moving. Then Rodney smiles a crooked smile, surprisingly sweet, and says, “You never make things easy.”

John places his hand down on the table. He doesn’t want Rodney to see it shake with sudden relief. On the island, he shakes too, but because of the wind that bites through him, even inside the house. Rodney rolls his eyes and tosses him another blanket. “It’s in your head,” he says. “Because if I’m not cold, you don’t get to be.” 

When Rodney grabs his oversized mug and arranges himself on the other end of the couch, ignoring the empty lazy boy across the room, John hides his smile by ducking his head into his shoulder. He waits until Rodney’s lost in his physics journal and muttering under his breath before edging his feet forward until his toes are wedged under Rodney’s thigh. 

“Hey,” Rodney says a few minutes later when their cold press registers. He smacks John’s shin. “Go get some socks.” John ignores him, and Rodney subsides back into his journal.

John’s fine with this. Or almost fine – if he wants more, well, John’s always wanted something more. Atlantis was never his dream, and a city without her people is just a place. It holds no sway over him, unlike Rodney enamored of its glories simply because they existed. John loved them because of the people they brought to life, because of the glow of wonder they gifted to Rodney’s eyes.

He falls asleep with warm toes and the crackle of the radio soft in the background. When he wakes up, Teyla’s still nodding at the creation myth the Menaxos are telling her and comets are still racing across the sky. Rodney’s scowling at his laptop. “Battery ran out,” he says. “Someone must have switched it. They’re going to be on sewer duty for a month when I find out who it was.”

Ronon looks over his shoulder. “Maybe it just died, McKay.”

Rodney scoffs. “Not one of my computers.” He straightens. “I rigged up a mini naquadah-powered battery for each of them.”

John has to laugh. “Of course you did, McKay.”

Belua says to Teyla, “Mother Edun, still burning with the fire of the comets, did not name the beasts of the fields, nor the serpents of the deep. It was for humans to do that, to give themselves name and to establish their dominion over all the world by naming each hart of the rock and hare of the wood.”

This is not the idea John grew up with. “God spake and it was.” Creation by word, not dominion over something already created by word. Patrick Sheppard said, “First Episcopal down on High Street is where we go. Half of the National Utilities Board maintains membership there. The annual fundraiser for the church is coming up. I expect you boys to be there.” 

For seven years on Atlantis, John does not give name to this thing that pulses behind his ribs. He can’t, because there’s no name for something so big. One day Rodney’s going to walk into his quarters without so much as a by-your-leave, as usual, and find him exploded into a million pieces because the human body isn’t great enough to contain something so fierce and fragile. John ends up calling it the reason he left his family; the reason he joined the Air Force; the reason he bled for Atlantis’s people; the reason he abandoned the city; the reason he left the jumpers; the reason he stayed in the Air Force; the reason he left the Air Force. 

He did not create it, nor does he have dominion over it, because in the end he’s not the one who names it. Rodney calls it “love.” 

After the mission to M3X-933, John gets sick. Keller doesn’t find anything on their normal post-mission check-ups. For a few weeks, they don’t even know the virus came from M3X-933 because of this, but when the third cycle of fevers wracks John’s body, the rest of his team heads back and questions the Menaxos. “Oh, yes,” they say, “our children commonly suffer from the fevers. They last about a week, and usually only come once. Sometimes an adult catches ill, and then it is worse, but it will pass. We do not catch it from each other, but from something that shares this planet with us.” 

Rodney takes samples of everything he can think of and in the end they find a small virus. Further tests on Atlantis show that it is just as the Menaxos claimed. It’s a fairly innocuous virus, spread only by the fecal matter of a fish that exists nowhere but on M3X-933 and the human body should be able to fight it off in under two weeks. 

“Eww,” John says lightly, against the worry on Rodney’s face. “I drank fecal matter.” He’s propped up in his bed in the infirmary with his arms at his side. His face itches but he doesn’t want Rodney to see the spaghetti of his arms, weak from five days of delirium.

Rodney doesn’t laugh. He crosses his arms over his chest and demands of Keller, “Why didn’t our water tablets take care of it?”

“I’m not sure,” she says. “It has something to do with the same reason that the Colonel’s been affected abnormally. From what I can tell, the antibodies that his body created are reacting to the retrovirus in his blood. They’ve bonded somehow. I think the worst is over, though. Each successive wave of fever has been shorter, less virulent. Maybe his body just needs time to adjust to its new configuration.”

“Great.” John tries not to sigh. 

+++

Afterwards, the only way he can describe the fevers to Rodney is to say that they’re like dappled light. Like being in a moving car that’s driving down a lane through a tree-cave in summer, late afternoon sun pressing through the spaces between broad leaves, and always in motion anyway, an endless squint and relax of blinding light and blinding shade dancing in irregular patterns.

+++

John spends Thanksgivings with Dave and his family. Dianna greets him with a soft kiss to his cheek, and the faint, perfect smell of her face cream tickles John’s nose. Somehow, even in the chilly breeze drifting through the open door, not one of her hairs is out of place. “Caitlin’s due back from her riding lesson soon. Ruth is upstairs blowing things up with her chemistry set.” Dianna’s eyeroll is at odds with her pearl necklace. 

Over dinner, Dave says, “It looks like it’s going to be a good holiday season. Stocks are still climbing. I think this is sustainable. John, our experiments with new alternative energy sources are progressing pretty well. We might have something for general consumption in ten years. We’ve boosted efficiency over coal and oil by 17%, and our new material is partially renewable. You want in? We could still use you.”

Dave’s been saying this for the last five years. It’s an offer made partially in jest, but not entirely. John thinks about naquadah and naquadriah, about subspace energy and ZPMs, and wishes that what Dave has would be enough. 

“It would be like globalization at the galactic level,” Rodney said once, his ghost limbs reaching out for a submerged city of myth. “Earth will never find a sustainable energy source on its own, without alien resources and tech. Think about industrialism and the shrinking of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From there we got to globalization and a world economy.” So John keeps an ear out in the SGC for new discoveries, new technologies that might get Rodney where he wants to be, which is not Earth.

“You never bring anyone for Thanksgiving dinner with you, John,” Dianna says. She smiles at him. “We’d love to have any guest of yours.”

This is probably why John keeps going back for Thanksgiving, despite the lingering awkwardness between him and Dave. Because Dave and Dianna say “we,” not “I.” Because somewhere Dave learned something more than Patrick Sheppard’s example. 

+++

Ever since they got back to Earth, Rodney’s actually visited John much more often than John thinks. He pops in randomly and without much, if any, warning. It’s just that after you’ve lived with a person in the same contained city, seen him every day, eaten with him, dragged him out of the labs, showered him with your blood and wiped his own off your face, three or four days here and there doesn’t cut it.

It’s pathetic but when he leaves, John finds himself pressing his face into the couch pillow that Rodney spent the last three days leaning into. It’s as if he can blot out all else with this simple thing.

It never goes down like this: 

The Sunday afternoon radio on Rodney’s island crackles out Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole. John’s never liked this stuff because at the more formal parties his father used to make him go to, this was the kind of music that was appropriate to dance to. It reminds him of sweaty teenaged palms and Mrs. Martin’s too-low dress. It fits the island Sundays, though, and Rodney will tolerate it, although not without comment. 

Nat sings, “When I fall in love, it will be forever,” and John’s only half listening, dazed by the fire. When he stirs, he blinks over at Rodney, who is watching him with a peculiar expression on his face, and Nat says, “And the moment I can feel that you feel that way too, is the moment I fall in love with you.” Rodney stands up and holds out his hand to John. John takes it, bemused, and lets Rodney pull him up off the sofa. “Come on,” Rodney tells him. “I want to show you something.”

Some things don’t play out the easy way. 

+++

John hates it, irrationally, when Rodney talks about his project. He manages to say everything and nothing at all. If John has his guesses about what he’s working on, he’s not going to let himself think about them because then he’d have to ask why, and there’s an obvious answer to that question – Rodney wants to go back – and a not-so-obvious answer to it – Rodney believes John wants to go back. The not-so-obvious one is the one that frightens him, and he squares his sloping shoulders and says, “Yes, sir,” and remembers that the Air Force said to him, ‘you be a soldier, and we’ll make sure you’re never alone.’ It took a long time, but they didn’t lie about that.

Rodney rants about how hard it is to work on something so purely abstract, something that exists solely on paper, and John says, “I thought you were a theoretical astrophysicist,” and gets a full measure of Rodney’s scorn in response. They’re in a car; John’s driving him back to the airport. As much as he later loves Sunday afternoons, lazy on the island with Rodney, now, a few years before he moves up there, he hates them because Rodney always leaves him on a Sunday. The trees are bare and silent, their limbs splayed and exposed to a merciless sky. The sides of the road are faintly white with the spray of crushed salt from yesterday’s snow plows. 

“I’m theoretical about theory,” Rodney says slowly, with strained patience. He’s always waspish, more so than usual, on Sundays too. As much as John would like to think it’s because he’s getting on a plane to fly away, it’s hard to truly believe that when Rodney’s spent the last three days telling him about the breakthrough he had last week and how he almost had to cancel his plans to come here – and Jesus, that shouldn’t have made John’s ribs pinch into his heart so hard – “and,” Rodney is still saying, “this should not be theory. One day it won’t be, and while it’s fine to speculate back and forth in journals about broken symmetry and eigenstates, someday I’m going to have to get my hands dirty about this.”

Two years later he comes to John, as if confessing, and tells him he has to take apart a jumper. 

Today, though, with the blue diamond sky hard above them and winter all around and the airport coming into sight, John hates that Rodney’s attention is already flying away from him, that it was never on him even when he landed and came through the gate rumpled and already scanning the crowd for John. 

+++

John always has warning about the fevers. His body begins to ache a few days before he actually gets wiped out by them, and this is how he’s managed to avoid any accidents. He’s never been off-world or flying when he drops into the fugue state. It’s not so much a delirium – the fevers don’t make him rave or render him vocal – as it is an uncontrolled blankness. Before Rodney found out about them, John managed to get through them alone. He would wake up two days later and find a glass of water next to his bed that he doesn’t remember putting there, or find that he hadn’t pissed himself, except for the few times he did. He never remembered getting up to go to the bathroom. Once there was even evidence of a shower, which freaked him out. 

He only knows about falling into the fever and coming out of it a few days later. Then one time, when he went under, as usual Rodney was not there. But when he awoke, he was. Other things registered first: the lack of sticky, dried sweat on his body, the way the sheets weren’t twisted around him in a hopeless clutch but were neat and smooth across his torso, the not quite dulcet tones of someone hissing into a phone. He reaches over, feeling every pound of his arm fighting against gravity, and touches two fingers to Rodney’s bare forearm, and Rodney instantly says, “I’ve got to go, General,” and hangs up without waiting for a response.

John’s heard about moments like this, times where you’re old enough to know better, tired and worn enough for buoyancy to be impossible, and yet where against all odds, for just one moment, the world is a shining place that comes together the way it should. He is not of the world, but one with the world. He thinks this is called grace.

“And I think you’re delirious after all,” Rodney tells him with a furrowed brow and downward slant to his mouth. John reaches up and tries to soothe it away. Rodney catches his hand. 

He gives John a day before he tears him a new one for being such an idiot as to try to tough through the fevers alone.

Before this, the fevers were something he was a little frightened of, something he couldn’t control, something with a nameless power. Now, though, he can’t help but be just a bit grateful to them for bringing Rodney back to him. Rodney would smack him if he knew that, but John never imagined a life without Rodney.

“It’s clearly not safe for you to be alone when they hit,” Rodney says. “And I can’t stay here. You’ll just have to come back to the island with me.”

“Yeah, McKay,” John says, “about that. You do realize I’m stationed here, right? I think the brass’ll notice if I waltz away to Canada.” 

“Hum.” Rodney’s got his thinking face on, but his eyes are wide and unhappy.

+++

John could have refused to tell Keller at all. To tell anyone. He doesn’t.

John could have agreed to tell Keller, or to let Rodney tell her, which brings Keller to his apartment in the fall dusk. She examines him and makes worried noises, and finally says, “You know I need you to come back to the SGC with me so that I can run tests. I don’t have the right equipment here to properly evaluate what’s going on. We’ll make up an excuse for the tests. I’ll hide the results, won’t store them on the main computer. But I need to see what’s going on with your blood.” 

Two weeks later, she calls John to her office and shuts the door. “It’s what you already knew, that it’s the old virus from M3X-933 acting up again. It appears to be cycling through your system again, only on a much longer, slower pattern this time. Instead of running its course of fevers in seven or eight months, this has been going on for years, but only with one or two fevers a year. This year you’ve had, what, four? It might be the peak. There’s evidence pointing that way.”

She pauses and looks down. “Colonel. You know – you must know I have to report this. I won’t recommend that they deactivate your flight status, but I can’t promise they won’t.” 

John looks at the cement wall of her office. He places his hand against it. It’s as cool as Atlantis ever was. “I can still fly the jumper. Not if they won’t let me, of course, but I mean even with a fever.” He takes in the alarmed expression on Jennifer’s face. “Don’t worry, Doc, I haven’t. But I know I could. It wouldn’t let anything happen to me.”

“They’re always going to come back, John. Like a cold sore,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

But what really happens is this:

Rodney says, “Please let her examine you,” and John responds, “Do you know what’s going to happen if she does? She’s find something wrong, because oh, yeah, you don’t just get alien fevers if you’re okay, and then it’ll be her duty to report it, and that’ll be it. Not that it really matters. I’m already desk-bound. Do you know when the last time I got off-world was? Eight months ago.”

“She won’t tell, John, she won’t. She’s one of us, one of yours.”

“She will if she thinks I’m a danger to myself or others.” Maybe he is. He hasn’t flown a chopper in several years, though, because of this. For himself he doesn’t care, but he won’t put any man at risk just for an hour of flight. He only flies their lone jumper now, when the SGC permits. 

Rodney picks up and turns over some Ancient doodad in the palms of his hands. Outside, the waves lash out at the slick rock. John’s taken a two week leave to go to Rodney’s place. “Well, if it comes to that, then you’ll have to resign from the Air Force,so she won’t have to report it.”

John stares at him.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Rodney snaps, a sure sign that he’s nervous. “You need to be examined, and Jennifer’s the best person to do it. She’s the only one I trust, too. But you have to be careful. Your blood and genes – they’re like this alphabet soup. You can’t let them get hold of you and turn you into a lab rat.”

“Do you really think they would?” John asks mildly. Not that he doesn’t have his own authority issues.

“No. Yes. No! I don’t know. But they can’t have you.” His words resound with surprising fierceness, and John has to shove his hands in his pockets to keep them contained to himself. 

“You should have had more jumpers,” Rodney says, mostly to himself as if John’s not standing next to him by the wide window looking out at the dark shoreline. They’re a waste of heat, these broad glass panes that do nothing against a long Atlantic winter, but Rodney likes them and John doesn’t mind splitting wood and bringing it in. “Just turn up the thermostat,” Rodney says impatiently.

“If there were more jumpers, then they’d let you fly them more often and you wouldn’t lose the sky.” Rodney’s still muttering and his shoulders are hunched in. “Because,” he swallows dryly, “it’s part of who you are, and as much as I don’t want you to crash, as many nightmares as I’ve always had about you and your harebrained suicide attempts, if you didn’t fly you wouldn’t be – I mean, people should be whole. Everyone. Not partial.” His eyes are wide. They belie his fifty-odd years. 

John watches phantom sparks outline the pieces of Rodney that were left behind a faraway Atlantis stargate, summary amputation. They dance over the skin wrapped around his bones; Rodney’s hand twitches. John has to go outside and stack wood. Sometimes he’s not sure if Rodney has any idea how he sounds, how he looks, how brightly he flares with life. It’s all John can do to stop himself from kissing him breathless, from laying his head down on his belly and letting his breath carry with it to Rodney’s skin the weight of his affection.

+++

The year after the fevers start again, Rodney gives a lecture at MIT. It’s in October when the fall colors are at their peak, and he calls John from the east coast and says, “You should come.” John’s on a plane three hours later. 

They take a walk through the woods, even though it makes John feel old. Here there is no running for their lives, no danger, no thrill, nothing to lose, nothing to find. Just friendly greetings to holler out to other hikers and Rodney’s familiar litany of complaints. “Seriously,” he says, “I think my feet have gone soft. I don’t remember blisters like this since the first year of the expedition.” 

If they ever get back to the city, John realizes, not for the first time, they will be old and soft. Every year that goes by is a year of decreasing muscle mass and strength, lost speed and stamina. 

“When we get back,” Rodney says, “I’m making Ronon do all my grunt work.”

“That’s what the marines are for,” John tells him, playing along.

Rodney tosses him a look over his shoulder and keeps walking up the trail. “I don’t think we’re going to have a contingent of marines, Sheppard. I don’t think that’s how it’s going to work. Actually, I thought I’d be a lot closer by now. Everything takes longer than you plan.”

John tips his head to the sky, golden-filtered. “No. It’s just that everything takes as much time as you have to give it.” 

The forest is red-gold, orange-gold, green-gold. It glows from the earth up, the under ferns casting their filigree over the rich soil. 

“It’s okay, though,” says Rodney as they crest the hill. “When we get back, we’ll have all the energy we need. It’s the only way we’ll get there in the first place.” He stands on the spine of the world and stretches his arms wide into the wind. John’s vision shifts: he sees Rodney as a mad wizard drawing the elements to himself and channeling them into the red-gold ZPM. The leaves and pine needles kick up a dance at their feet in response. Later, Rodney adds in the fluid virulence of the Atlantic, namesake of his beloved. John imagines him out on the wet, black rock of his island in a driving rain, magicking time and space into controlled energy.

Reality, it turns out, is more mundane. But not by that much, because as smart as John is, what Rodney does, what’s Rodney’s always done, is beyond his grasp of physics, beyond his grasp of reality. 

+++

Sometimes John worries that Rodney’s using his project to replace Atlantis. He worries that when Rodney finishes it, he’ll be lost, especially after he leaves the SGC. Rodney’s goal-oriented, unlike John who’s always been content to take things as they come. Or, that’s not it exactly – it’s that John’s focus isn’t things, but people. If people knew, they would say that John’s fallen in love twice, first with the expedition and then with Rodney, or maybe the other way around. But John knows he’s only fallen in love once, because Rodney was always the heart of the expedition for him, the one needful thing, and if he had asked him to stay on Atlantis, even without the rest of his people, John would have. 

Thank god he didn’t, thank god for mercy, only everyone’s scattered to the four corners of the earth anyway, these days. He has lunch with Lorne, now a Lieutenant Colonel and swiftly rising, the perfect officer that John never was, and Lorne says, “Don’t worry, sir. When McKay gets you back there, I’ll keep an eye on everyone. Already do, which is mostly redundant with you around. Soldier’s habit, I guess.” He smiles wryly. 

With a start, there in the middle of a crowded diner with cracking vinyl seats, John remembers something the way he doesn’t remember when he wakes from his fevers: a hazy, fire-warm knowledge that’s not quite his own but will become so. He’s been a soldier for over twenty years, but he never set out to be one, just like he didn’t set out to fly. The Air Force promised John that he’d never be alone, that there’d always be a man at his back, and somewhere along the way, earlier than he admits, he learned that there are many ways to do the right thing. Sometimes doing the right thing means following orders and going back to Earth; other times it means disobeying orders and leaving a city’s treasures to their peace under a dark grey sea. 

John considers protesting, pointing out that it’s not him who needs to get back, but no one ever believes these claims of his. Maybe they don’t need to. Instead he asks, “How do you know McKay’s going to get me back?” and Lorne just smiles at him and shakes his head.

John has spent his life yearning for connection. He has chased down the entire world to find it, crossed light years and hopscotched galaxies, but even his wings aren’t large enough to span the entire world at once. 

Maybe they don’t have to be.

“Got your back, John,” Lorne tells him, emphasizing ‘John.’ “We all do.” 

+++

Finally, it catches John off-guard. Nine months after he moves in with Rodney, he comes home one October night to find Rodney staring at the television blankly. Up here, the leaves have already dropped from the trees in the center of the island. There are no trees at the spray-blasted edges. John’s just gotten off-shift, and he’s still got grease under his nails from the mechanic’s shop he works at part-time, just to have something to do. 

“You gotta admit, McKay,” he’d said when he picked up the job, “there’s not a lot to do around here.” Rodney looked stricken. “Nah, I like it, though,” he’d added. “It’s clean work. I used to do a lot with planes, back when I was starting out. I know my way around.” They both know this. If John can fool with a space ship, then he sure as hell can handle a few cars. He was telling the truth: he does enjoy the cars. Better than the occasional consulting for the SGC he still does.

He stops by the edge of the couch where Rodney’s sprawled in an arrangement that should look cozy and relaxed, and is anything but. The newscaster is talking about the President’s ongoing trip to Russia, and John looks at Rodney in question. Rodney flips the channel. A smooth-faced reporter says, “Today the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics. Dr. Helmut Renke of the University of Sydney will share the prize with Dr. Adam Johnson of Cavendish, Cambridge for their shared work in quantum fluctuations.”

“Renke,” Rodney says in a voice so disgusted that John scratches at his cheek to hide the smile turning his mouth. “The man’s a fraud, doesn’t know a top quark from an up quark, much less anything worthy of a Nobel. And Johnson’s just as much an imbecile. Three years ago he gave a lecture at the CMMP conference that was wrong, wrong, wrong. And Sam was there threatening to duct-tape my mouth so I couldn’t even tell him what he a moron he was.” 

John alternately shakes his head and nods as Rodney’s spew of words picks up pace. He catches terms that he hasn’t heard since Atlantis, since the last time he was caught in the crossfire between Rodney and Zelenka, and in fact he’s pretty sure he hears a few Czech words thrown into the air by Rodney even now; he hears a hundred synonyms for moron and unfair and blind. 

“That sucks, McKay,” he makes the mistake of saying after about fifteen minutes of this when Rodney’s face is pink and he’s probably burned up several hundred calories just from his arm-waving. 

“Sucks?” Rodney echoes. “It sucks? No, you don’t get to say that. Because you don’t get it, Sheppard. The greenest, most pathetic lab tech at Area 51 is twenty years ahead of these two Nobel-worthies.” He sneers that last. “My stupidest minion before I left the SGC was thirty years ahead of them. Kavanagh is forty years ahead of them. Radek and Sam are light-years ahead of them in theory and practice, and me – I’m three and a half million light-years ahead of them.” His voice cracks on three, and he says it again. “Three and a half million light-years ahead of them, John, do you understand?”

This is what John understands: that Rodney’s eyes are too bright, his lashes spiky with water; that he’s still talking, as ever, saying that he will never win his Nobel; and that Atlantis is three and a half million light-years from Earth. 

+++

Water isn’t actually blue. Sometimes, on the surface of the ocean, it just looks that way. Rodney once told John how he dreams about the city, grounded on the bottom of the sea three million light-years ago, away. It isn’t blue that far down, but nor is it black the way it should be without light. It’s brown and grey in Rodney’s dreams, all the dreams that John doesn’t have when he fevers. 

This is what he swims through until he surfaces as the illness breaks, sepia nothingness rising – he is rising – to the wide sky of Rodney’s face and the place where oblivion merges with awareness, creating memory. 

This is what John thinks happens, but will never be sure of: 

Rodney is carding his fingers through his hair. He lingers longest where there is the most grey. His thigh bunches up the pillow where John’s head rests on the bed and mashes John’s face into the feathery lightness. John blinks at his leg a few inches away. It’s solid, like his hand, which feels as though it could span the whole of John’s scalp, steadying. 

“You were going to save us all, weren’t you, John.” His voice doesn’t question. “Change the world.” 

John can hear the laughter in his voice. It should be mocking, but smacks more of rue than anything else. As he reaches the surface, he feels the wash of Rodney’s huffed breath on his skin. “You joined the Air Force because it was your time to be alive. Christ, I can just see you. Smarter than everyone else and hiding it beneath a slouch just this side of insubordinate. Always one eye to the sky because you always wanted more. Still. You always want more.” He leans over John and presses his forehead to his. John hastily shuts his eyes, even though this risks lassitude overtaking him again. The Athosian greeting is awkward at this angle, their foreheads at right corners to each other, and nothing ever felt so right. 

“Greedy,” Rodney whispers against the corner of his eye. This is last thing John thinks might have happened before he drifts into a true sleep, safe on the surface. 

+++

Rodney’s house on the island is larger than it first appears. On the first floor is a kitchen, sunlit, and the spacious living room where they spend Sundays. There’s a mud room. A door to the basement that’s always shut. A half bath. A small den that’s crammed with books and journals. The staircase to the bedrooms upstairs and one room that John’s never been in. Rodney told him it used to be two other rooms, but he knocked down the wall between them. It’s the same on the first floor. There’s a large room where Rodney spends most of his days, working, and John’s never gone into it. The curtains are always drawn so it’s impossible to see in from the outside as well. Rodney never told him he couldn’t enter it or asked him to stay out of there, but John figured that if they were going to live together in one house, so much less than an entire city, and not kill each other, they needed some space. Also, if Rodney won’t even talk to him about his project, he doesn’t think that barging into the middle of it physically would go over too well.

The TV is still droning on in the background, the newscaster talking about the other Nobel laureates of 2021, and Rodney is saying, “My stupidest minion before I left the SGC was thirty years ahead of them. Kavanagh is forty years ahead of them. Radek and Sam are light-years ahead of them in theory and practice, and me – I’m three and a half million light-years ahead of them.” His voice cracks on three, and he says it again. “Three and a half million light-years ahead of them, John, do you understand?”

John glances behind himself, involuntarily, at the door hiding the room he’s never been into. “Rodney,” he says slowly, “what have you done?” He has a terrible, terrible feeling creeping through his veins, weighing down his belly, stealing his breath. 

“And every year I have to watch my Nobel go to some prize idiot who hasn’t done half of – I, what?” Rodney’s eyes shift from the TV to John. John sees him suck his breath in, tight, suddenly wary. There must be something horrible on John’s face. “What do you mean?”

But John’s already moving. He sees his hands, brake lubricant clinging to his nails, reaching out for the round handle of the door even as Rodney stands up from the couch in a flurry and trips over his coffee cup in an effort to get to John to – do what? Get there first? Stop him? Show him the way?

“John, wait,” he calls out desperately, and it’s too late, John’s opening the door into his mad scientist’s laboratory. There are at least ten computers scattered around the tables. Some of the tables are metal and plastic, lab counters, while others are heavy wooden things, scarred and dark, old pieces of furniture that look like they just might be able to hold the weight of a man’s dreams on their backs. There are blackboards with dusty chalk and electronic whiteboards scrawled over with math John’s never seen, and in the corners and lining the walls, stacked high in piles and scattered all over the floor are the parts – the shell and the guts – of a disassembled jumper. There’s the pilot’s seat lying on its side by the windows, and the hard cushions from the benches in the aft of the jumper. The blanket tossed over them tells a story about Rodney crashing down on them long after he should have been in bed, those nights when John doesn’t hear his footsteps walk up the stairs and down the hallway past his bedroom. There are crystals in boxes and crystals sticking out of weird things, contorted pieces of tech John’s never seen before – 

and in the center underneath the half-broken exoskeleton of the jumper, seated in some fantastic device, there’s a red-gold cylinder that looks familiar and utterly alien, like no ZPM that John’s ever seen and unmistakable as anything else.

“Oh, Jesus, Rodney, what did you do?” 

John can’t look at him. If he does, the prickle under his lower eyelids might swell and the awful sensation that draws him to the strange little ZPM and makes him drop to his knees beside it might grow too big, might swallow him up. There’s something large inside him, a tiny, tiny balloon that he started heaving air into fruitlessly the day he joined the Air Force, that only started filling the moment it should have been frozen deep under the ice in Antarctica as the galaxy sparkled around the edges of his vision, that has been expanding relentlessly for the last fifteen years. It’s fragile, fragile, the skin too thin to contain something as immense as the infinitely expanding universe and all its power. 

Rodney’s there beside him falling to his knees with a wince of joint pain. He stares at John over the little ZPM. John sees every line on his face, every wrinkle that’s there and those to come, the open skew of his mouth, the equal amounts of resistance and pleading in his eyes, always too young and expectant despite the hard crush of their years. 

“I didn’t do anything,” he says, almost pleading. “I’m not done yet. You weren’t supposed to find out this way.” 

John stares back. “This way? How the hell was I supposed to find out then? When you said ‘See you around, John’ and headed off to the mountain? When you dropped off the face of the world for another fucking galaxy? When I woke up one morning and you weren’t there because you won’t even tell me what you’ve been working on, what’s been consuming you, for the last ten, twelve years?” John’s yelling at this point.

“Right,” Rodney shouts back. “‘And by the way, honey, I’m building a ZPM in the garage.’ Is that what I’m supposed to say?”

“Yes! Goddammit, Rodney.” John leans back on his heels and punches his fist into the floor, because he has to. The baby ZPM shimmers on the floor an inch away from his knees. 

“Oh, that’s the way to handle it, Colonel. Because no,” says Rodney, furious, ignoring that John’s retired. “You don’t get to talk here, Major ‘So long, McKay’ Sheppard. And you don’t get to act like you’re surprised or like you’re going to be left here or like you’re not going to be going with me, in front of me, because that’s what you do.”

And actually John’s not surprised. He can’t say he didn’t suspect, somewhere deep in his mind that never touches the surface of his thoughts except when the fevers break and he rises to the surface of consciousness through Rodney’s alien Atlantic ocean. He can’t say he couldn’t have guessed what Rodney was up to, closeted away all these years, all his thought bent on returning to the city he never wanted to leave. Nor did John ever imagine that Rodney would go without him, because John won’t let him. Because he won’t risk Rodney’s life like that; because where Rodney is, there is John, and if John’s wings aren’t big enough to span the entire world then they sure as hell won’t stretch all the way to the Pegasus; because being a soldier means doing what you have to do and in the end, John has to – cannot do anything but – go with Rodney. 

Whatever Rodney sees in John’s face, though, maybe it’s not this. He narrows his eyes and jabs his finger into the golden air between them. “We are going home,” he says, his voice shaking and low, sounding like every word is being drawn through his clenched teeth, “and I am taking you there.” 

This – this is what’s terrible. Awful in every sense of the word. It’s everything that John ever dreamed of, everything that his horrible expectation of life ever promised, everything that Patrick Sheppard couldn’t see and couldn’t give his son, everything Grace Sheppard feared for her son’s contrary heart, pulled in all directions. Because Rodney is handing him space and the universe itself contained in the red-gold heart of a baby ZPM, and in space there is no up or down, no north and west, no east and south, and he didn’t ask for any of this. 

“Christ, Rodney.” John drops his head and closes his eyes. “I didn’t ask you to do this. You didn’t have to spend your life like this. Why did you do it? Didn’t it occur to you that maybe I was happy right here?” He doesn’t know why he’s saying this, saying these things. They’re only cruel. 

Rodney reels back. “Fuck you, John Sheppard,” he spits with quiet venom. “You don’t get to play that card. You. Owe. Me. You will do this for me. You will give me this because that’s the way you are. You can’t ask for the things you need, not as long as I’ve known you and I’ve known you your whole life, John, for all the time that’s mattered, for light years. The way we can still see the light of stars that existed millennia ago. So this isn’t about you because you’re a messed-up moron who can take care of an entire city, who tries to take care of an entire galaxy and yet won’t take care of himself. You don’t get a choice anymore because this isn’t about you.” 

He presses the back of his hand, fingers clenched, to his mouth in a swift motion. “This is about me, and you will do this for me.” 

Only Rodney could order someone to accept the greatest gift he’ll ever know. Rodney wants him to believe that he’s doing this for Rodney, and John needs to believe the same. And maybe he is. It’s always easier to do something for someone else. So Rodney will build a ZPM for John and John will let Rodney take him across the universe, and love is like this, selfish and greedy and more generous than a heart can bear.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” John whispers at last without knowing why he’s hushed. The shadows are lengthening in the room like the years of their lives, their life, as the sun slips behind the glowing autumn trees and its curtained half-light fades. 

Rodney shakes his head with a wan smile. “How could I? What if it didn’t work? What if it doesn’t work? I told you, I’m not done yet.”

John glances down at that baby ZPM still sitting between them, and then he looks back up. “It’ll work,” he says. His voice is steady and unshakeable and confident. “You’ve never failed me.”

Rodney’s smile changes. It becomes full and brilliant, and then he’s reaching out across the ZPM to him, pulling him in, and touching his lips to John’s face, to the side of his mouth and its center, and his big hands cradle John’s ears, his jaw, the corner of his eyes like he’s something precious, and to Rodney, John realizes, he is, because it’s John who has to say against his raspy cheek, “The ZPM, we can’t tip it over,” and Rodney startles back and curses without heat. 

“Finally.” John wants to laugh and cry and throw his arms wide in exhilaration and never let Rodney go. “Thank god,” he says, and Rodney has the audacity to look at him in amazement and say, “What are you talking about? I’ve been right here.” He stands up with a cracking sound and a half-hearted scowl at John for keeping him in that position so long, and jerks his head. “Well, come on then.”

But John can’t, because relief is coursing through his body and making him weak, and so Rodney rolls his eyes and mutters something about grown men with the emotional stamina of teenage boys and he wraps his arm around John’s waist and hauls him up. They manage to make it ten feet, and all the way their knees knock together and their feet tangle, and John is rewriting the boundaries of Rodney’s body even as Rodney does the same to him. The cushions from the jumper benches are as hard as they ever were on John’s ass when he collapses onto one, onto Rodney’s crumpled blanket, and takes Rodney down with him. 

Rodney’s weight calms his breath, gives him ease even as it bears down on him. He slides his hands under Rodney’s shirt, palming the planes of his broad back, insatiable for bare skin and the living flex of his flesh, its give and resilience. He fumbles between them, and when his hand touches Rodney for the first time, the solid press of his cock, a shudder runs through John’s body as though it were his own cock being stroked. 

“Rodney,” he croaks, and Rodney kisses him under his ear, all over, and then he pulls up and takes off his shirt and somehow manages to undo both their pants, even if they don’t get them all the way off, and he pushes John’s shirt up so that it bunches under his arms. Cool air rushes into the gap between them, but he’s back, his body warm and forgiving, before John can mind the loss, and now it’s better because John can smell him and touch him and see him. He hooks one leg around him to anchor them as Rodney flexes his body and rubs into John’s belly. Their cocks slide past each other. John knows that his breath is a harsh groan in Rodney’s ear, just as Rodney’s is in his. He can feel Rodney’s heart galloping, and when Rodney tucks his face into the curve of his neck and mouths aside the line of his shirt as they rut together with no elegance and more grace than John’s ever known, he has to close his eyes against the sudden heat rushing to them.

Objectively, the sex could be better: they could do this on a bed, with lube, with something resembling finesse, but it’s not necessary. Their bodies could be younger, quicker to respond – “and go off like firecrackers, no thank you,” Rodney snorts – and John chuckles and curls his fingers needfully into Rodney’s shoulder. Here among the broken pieces of the jumper with the little ZPM standing guard and the distant crash of the grey ocean beyond, they need nothing more than to yield, at last. 

There’s a smudge of brake fluid on Rodney’s cheek.

+++

Over the years, John has hallucinated but not because of his fevers. Sometimes he has turned his head while walking down the street and caught sight of Dr. Gonzalez or Sgt. Simmons or Halling. He’s seen Ferber in a park and Carpio at Dunkin’ Donuts and Wong at a bus stop. After Zelenka re-crosses the Atlantis for Europe, John catches a glimpse of him at Eglin Air Force Base down in Florida. Simpson’s been in South Africa for two years when he sees her in the stands at a Virginia Tech game that Dave drags him to, thinking he’ll enjoy it. Maybe he even does. He even once sees Lorne in San Francisco and stands there stupidly blinking until Lorne waves at him, crosses the street, and says, “Colonel Sheppard, it’s good to see you. What brings you here?” and then John realizes he’s real. 

But then three months later he sees Tecza, who’s finally made Major because he was just a wee thing when he shipped out to Atlantis, standing with his hands in his pockets and his bag slung over his shoulder, coming out of Circuit City as John goes in, and it was only last week that John got word that his unit took heavy fire in Belarus, and Tecza didn’t make it. In proportionate numbers, John’s actually lost more people on Earth in civil conflict than off-world. All war on Earth is civil, because when you know there’s not just one inhabited world, not just one inhabited galaxy, but a whole universe of sentient living beings, it makes intra-Earth conflict seem like one stupid civil war. Lemes got his legs blown off on PX4-003; McFyddon went down on one of the moons of Kueltheria. Dr. Biro was infected in the SGC with something that made Ebola look like fun, and John’s not sure what column to count that in.

After he runs into Tecza exiting Circuit City, he calls Rodney. “Whatcha up to?” he asks. 

“Undoubtedly more important things than you,” Rodney replies from five hours and two major mountain ranges away. Then he sighs. “No, probably not, sadly. I’m grading. Pit of hell, I tell you.” 

“Grading? Are you teaching?” John can practically hear Rodney shake his head and roll his eyes. 

“I don’t even know how I get roped into these things. It starts with Jeannie calling me every five minutes until I finally pick up.” Rodney does have a habit of ignoring phone calls, although somehow he always answers when John really needs him to. “She says – you know that sugar-sweet voice she gets—” 

“Uh-huh.” John does know that voice, too well.

“Yeah. So she says, ‘It would be such a huge favor, Mer,’ even though I keep telling her not to call me that anytime Maddie’s around, and I know she was listening in on the other line because that’s totally something Jeannie used to do when she was fifteen.”

“Actually,” John interjects, “Madison’s almost eighteen. She was nine when we left Atlantis. Probably wasn’t listening in.” 

Rodney harrumphs and barrels on. “Anyway. I said, ‘Favor to who?’ and do you know what she says back? And let me tell you this is not a good way to ask a favor – she says, ‘Favor to whom.’ So I hung up the phone because just because she married an English major doesn’t mean she needs to talk like one.”

John winces for him. “Ow. Stupid move, McKay.”

“Tell me about it. Of course then I had to do the favor, even though it was really for said English major. He has some friend over this way, Dean Tillman. And the next thing I know I’m teaching Physics 305, Introduction to Theoretical Physics, at the local community college on the mainland. It was like one of those times in a movie when everything twists into slow motion and the voices get elongated and deep. Local. Community. College.”

What really happened is that Jeannie’s spent the last few years becoming more and more worried about her brother as he increasingly holes himself up to work on his project. She’s been trying to figure out a way to force him to achieve some minimum level of weekly human interaction. John knows this because she calls him, John, every five or six weeks and makes sure he does. “Not that he was ever the most adept of social creatures,” she says with just enough fondness that John doesn’t bristle. “But at least when he was working he had to deal with people, even if they were mostly his minions.” She sighs. “I always wanted minions when I was growing up.” 

There’s an expectant pause on the line from McKay. “So when are you going to come rescue me, Sheppard?”

John laughs, grateful to Rodney for making this easy. It might even be deliberate. “How about this weekend?” and Rodney instantly replies, “Sure,” and “Why, what’s wrong?” 

John grits his teeth. Not so easy, then. He doesn’t think this is the right moment to get into a discussion about seeing dead people shopping for electronics. He’s not sure if there is a right moment for that conversation. Instead he says, “You ever think about Ronon and Teyla?”

Rodney squawks. “Of course I do. What do you take me for?”

There’s a long silence. Phone silences are always weird, but Rodney rides it out. John can hear the scritch of his pen, undoubtedly red, on paper, the exam printouts. He can hear his own breath. “I left them behind.”

“Don’t be an ass.” Rodney’s response is immediate. “You’d better catch the next flight out because I suddenly find myself needing to smack you upside the head. Violently.”

John doesn’t say anything.

“John,” Rodney says heavily. “You can’t leave behind someone who’s where he wants to be. You can’t leave someone behind in her home. They don’t have issues. You do.” 

Teyla tucks her leg under her, back into the chair. She only sits like this when not in public. They’re all tucked away together in what John calls the rec room, a small rectangle that smells like Teyla’s incense and has Rodney’s thirteenth favorite laptop sitting next to the knife Ronon was sharpening last week. Sometimes John forgets that Teyla is the leader of her people, not because she doesn’t act like it but because she’s Teyla and somewhat like a sister he didn’t know he had. “If Aiden is dead,” she says, “then he died as he would have wanted to. If he is lost, then he wishes to be lost.”

“Yeah, drugged on Wraith enzyme,” Rodney says. “Does that count? He’s out of his mind.” 

Ronon stares at Teyla. “He’s dead. No one could have survived that hive blast.” John catches the nasty look Rodney aims at Ronon, not for his own sake, John knows, since Rodney also believes that Ford is dead, but for John. Who doesn’t. “And if he’s drugged, then he doesn’t know what he wants. Whatever he thinks he wants is wrong.”

Teyla shakes her head. “It does not matter what he was before, except that that is how we knew him. Aiden is a new person now. Who are we to say that what he feels is invalid simply because it is different?”

“It’s not real.” Ronon shrugs. “Just cuz you believe something doesn’t make it true. It has to be true on its own, too.”

“Oh my god,” Rodney says. “If I wanted to have a debate about the merits of relative versus absolute truth, I’d be sitting with the philosophers.”

John looks up from the movie that only he is watching, determinedly so. “Do we actually have any of those?”

“Sanchez has a double Ph.D. with modern philosophy and sociology. Yet another argument against the soft sciences.” Rodney stares down into his mug with disgust, as if surprised to find it empty. 

“Bring me some coffee,” he tells John over the phone. “I ran out of the good stuff, and even though I ordered more, it’s going to take three days for it to get to the island. Everything takes forever here. You’ll get here sooner with it than they will.” 

When John arrives the next evening, he’s startled to see the large bay window of Rodney’s house, the one that’s always curtained over from the inside, boarded up. Not just the window, either, but half that side of the house. “Holy crap, McKay. What happened here? You blow something up finally?”

“Hah,” Rodney says without laughing. “I’m just – I, uh, small bit of renovation, that’s all. Good time for it, you know. Early September. It’s not really cold yet. It’ll be done this week.”

John raises an eyebrow. “That hole’s big enough to drive a car through. Hell, you could probably get a jumper through that. Not really so minor.”

Rodney snorts. “Please. You hungry? I have food.” He looks around the kitchen where they’re standing. “Er, I think it needs to be cooked.”

John shoulders his bag to drop upstairs. “Yes, Rodney, I’ll take care of it.” Secretly he is pleased, but he makes sure to sound long-suffering. 

Later, in front of a fire they don’t really need yet enjoy anyway, Rodney says, “You’ll see them again, you know.”

The heat of the fire is making John sluggish. “Huh?”

“Ronon and Teyla.” 

And John suddenly finds himself wishing that his virus were acting up again, that it wasn’t the warmth of the fire creeping up his leg but the drugging heaviness of a fever. An excuse to lay down his head, perhaps even on Rodney’s thigh, because he feels sick with longing. Only Rodney doesn’t know about the fevers and John doesn’t want him to know, to carry that burden as well. Probably in the end this is how Rodney finds out anyway: John’s never been sure that he didn’t pick up that phone while burning up and oblivious and call Rodney to him, so that one day he woke up and found him there. 

Rodney props his feet on a small stool and glances at John on the other side of the couch. He never takes the chair, claiming that the fire heats him more evenly if he sits on the couch too. “You’re making me tired just looking at you, Sheppard. Seriously, are you falling over? Just lie down already,” and then, softly, later when John’s drifting off, “I promise, John.”

+++

It could have gone down like this:

A year passes after John finds out about the ZPM project and then five, and then ten. At the end of one year, Rodney stares at the ZPM and says, “Just give me another ten months. It should be working, I don’t know why it’s not.” At the end of five years, he calls Radek and says, “I don’t care what you have to drop, just get over here. I – I need your help.” At the end of ten, he stands by the window, wraps his arms about himself, and opens the curtain for the first time John’s ever seen. Sam rests her hand on his shoulder. Radek takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes tiredly. Rodney looks around, almost helplessly, looking for John, he knows. 

He’s here. He presses a kiss to Rodney’s temple and rests the side of his head against Rodney’s. He has to tilt his head so that he doesn’t knock the rim of Rodney’s glasses. Sam and Radek don’t blink.

“It’s never going to work, is it.” Rodney’s not asking. 

John continues to write imaginary letters to Teyla and Ronon. Torren turns fourteen, seventeen, twenty, twenty-two. John sends his letters by intergalactic carrier pigeon. Rodney stares at him in bemusement and no small amount of superiority – because at least he doesn’t have imaginary bird messengers winging their way to the Pegasus – and then steps into the shower behind him one morning, which John hates; he hates sharing showers – and says, as he washes John’s back, “You and Zelenka, sheesh. Uhm. I could get you some, if you want, from him. Good breeding lines and whatnot.” It makes John have to kiss him, right there, right under the spray. Which is another thing John doesn’t like – the spray of the shower, water in his eyes. 

“Were you always this neurotic?” Rodney says one day after John switches the salt and pepper shakers so that the salt is on the right of the pepper. 

“Actually, yes,” he replies, and adds a postscript to the latest letter. ‘Rodney says hello and sends his love,’ because John’s not very good at saying it and actually neither is Rodney so much, but John can say it for him, easily. 

John gives him time to mourn his loss, which maybe Rodney should have done twenty years ago, but it doesn’t really matter. John can’t and will never be able to fill up all the empty places inside Rodney, not just from losing the city the first time but from failing to get back to her, from not being able to construct a working ZPM, one man on an island in the grey Atlantic, but John doesn’t have to. He only has to be here.

Obviously it doesn’t go down like this. Because while John wouldn’t have considered this a failure by Rodney, not at all – Rodney can’t fail him and never has and never will – Rodney would have considered this a failure. And Rodney’s never failed John, and never has and never will.

It could have gone like this, then:

One day, spring-bright, Rodney shows up at the mechanic’s shop around noon. The air is cold this far north even though it’s the end of May, and the trees are only starting to turn the palest green. Winter clings to the ocean’s spray and the black rocks, treacherous. 

John wipes his hands on a rag, tucks it into his back pocket, and saunters over to where Rodney stands, hunched up and jittering with the cold, or maybe too much caffeine, or maybe excitement. John doesn’t do as much sauntering these days as he used to because that old ligament he tore when he was twenty-two and stupid on life in Basic Officer Training gives him trouble, but it’s always worth it just to see Rodney’s pupils dilate with equal parts want and exasperated affection. 

Today, though, four years after John burst into his wide-windowed room and found the baby ZPM, incomplete, Rodney is spring-bright, too. He barely waits for John to reach him before dragging him behind a parked truck and whispering fiercely, “I’ve got it, John. I’ve got it. Another year or two – I’m missing some parts and the SGC needs to get them from one of our off-world allies, and I have to finesse some of the calculations – and it’ll be done, working, ready to power us up.” And this to Rodney is hope, the expectation of something more, and he can afford to be patient for another fifteen months after waiting this long. 

John, never demonstrative, slides his hands out of his pockets and lifts the aviators he donned when he walked outside with Rodney so that Rodney can see his eyes and the truths they hold.

But, of course, this isn’t what happens either, because Rodney doesn’t wait; Rodney doesn’t pay any attention to the normal impossibilities of life; Rodney doesn’t know about being down to earth because he’s three million light years away. By the time John finds out what he’s been doing, it’s already been over ten years that they’ve been back and Rodney’s had enough. John has fevers that ground him, and his only chance of flight lies in the Pegasus galaxy, in a city buried under millions of metric tons of water. John’s father, the United States Air Force, every commanding officer he ever had including Carter, and yes, Rodney – they all told John he couldn’t save the world. But no one told Rodney he couldn’t save John, not even John. Because if Rodney gets to save John, then John gets to save Rodney. And maybe he can’t save the world, but no one, not even Rodney, ever told John he can’t at least do this.

So this is the way it really goes down.

It’s the highest price anyone ever pays to go through the gate. Outside of blood, that is, the rivulets and rivers of blood that anyone who’s ever been on a gate team has paid in passage home through the gate. Between ancient tech left salvaged from the Antarctic base, brought back to Earth from the city, and the cannibalized jumper, Rodney manages to build not just a baby ZPM, but also a baby-baby ZPM. 

“We’ll need it,” he says. “That was always the risk we took when we moved the city so that no one would know where it was and be able to use it to get to Earth or be able to destroy the city itself. That we’d come back someday after having left barely enough energy in the ZPM to power the shields against the ocean.”

So he agrees to let the SGC keep the baby ZPM, the more powerful of the two, after they use it to send him and John back to the city. They take the baby-baby ZPM with them, which John simply called “Zed.” Once they get back, Rodney’s going to use its energy to make real ZPMs, true ZPMs, because the materials were always there, unlike on Earth, and now he knows how. 

The deal is that the SGC will let them use the gate and in return, Rodney will provide them with ZPMs. “How generous,” he harrumphs. He’s mad because the IOA wants to send a small military contingent with him for safety’s sake – after all, this isn’t an expedition or anything like it – and John, well John’s not military any more, is he. 

Losing his patience finally at how long it’s taking the IOA to reach a decision, not that there’s any real doubt about John going along because Rodney’s not having it and John’s not letting him go without him, Rodney barges into a meeting involving several members of the IOA, Generals Landry, O’Neill, and Roberts, rumored to be in grooming for Landry’s position, and a few flunkies. John picks up on his intent about eight feet before he does it and stumbles into the meeting after him as he’s trying to stop him, hissing, “This is not best way to go about this, McKay.” 

Rodney ignores him and stares down the room. General Roberts, who has the least experience with Rodney, is half on his feet; Ms. Xu is sputtering. “Look,” Rodney says, “I’m not going without Sheppard, and without me, without us, you don’t get your shiny new fully-charged ZPMs. So get over it already.”

Rodney's never been the most polite person, but whatever restraint he did have once upon a time has faded with the years. 

“McKay.” John’s voice is a strangled moan. He prudently decides to back out of the briefing room.

O’Neill tosses his pen on the table, leans back in his chair, and says, “Whoa, hoss. Stay right there, Colonel.” Everyone ignores that John’s retired, except for when it’s convenient not to. 

And then there’s a lot of arguing involving Rodney and everyone else except John and O’Neill. O’Neill participates by rolling his eyes at John several times, and finally says, “For god’s sake, just ship ‘em out already. We’re going to anyway.”

Ms. Xu folds her hands on the glossy tabletop, and for a moment John has to look away because it’s so reminiscent of Elizabeth, but only for that moment because the next thing she says is, “You cannot say such a thing, General. We have not made that decision yet, and frankly, Dr. McKay’s unwarranted behavior inclines me to—”

“I know,” Jack says. “He’s a pain in the ass. But just trust me on this one. In the end we’re going to send them. These guys took on the Wraith and lived to tell the tale. I mean, at least none of our baddies want to eat us. So I don’t know about your inclination, but me, I’m not really inclined to get in their way.”

Rodney blinks at him. John stifles a smile. 

“And also,” Jack adds as an afterthought, “Daniel’s starting to nag.”

They send a MALP through first, and it shows the gateroom just as they left it, atmosphere intact. John shoves through crates of supplies – Rodney’s equipment, food, ammo – and then nods sharply at O’Neill and steps through the gate with Rodney at his side because the exasperating man insisted. 

“Together,” he whispers fiercely. 

“It might not be safe. I should go first.” 

Rodney snorted. “No one’s been there since us. And I didn’t leave any booby-traps. What about you?”

They compromise: Rodney, who wanted to carry Zed through the gate in his arms, packs it in a cradle of padding in one of the crates, and picks up a 9 mil instead. The first thing they do on the other side is initialize basic systems and check remaining power levels in the existing ZPM. Or rather, Rodney rushes to the controls to do this while John patrols the perimeter of the gateroom, stopping occasionally to run his hand over the city’s cool, dark metal, to cock his head and catch the welcome chorus she sings. Then they report back through the gate and tell Earth to shut down the wormhole. 

“Situation normal, sir,” John tells O’Neill. 

O’Neill reminds them that they have three months to dial in a report. That’s the time Rodney estimated he’d need to build the first ZPM so that they can power the gate to Earth. “Or better yet, a ZPM or two.” His tone is equal parts chiding and amused. “And after that we’ll start to fuss.” 

“Don’t worry, mom. We’ll call if we need a ride home.” John grins as the gate flickers out on the general’s huff of laughter. 

The blue of the gate disappears. Rodney turns to John, and John sees him standing there, unsmiling, expressionless, about to fall apart completely as the weight of his exile vanishes into oblivion, caught somewhere in the wormhole home. The network of lines around his face and mouth, like one of John’s fevers, is forgotten, though ever-present. The universe hangs in the balance between them and there is nothing John can say, nothing to do except lay down his weapon and cross the room and wrap his arms around Rodney and bury his face in the crook of his neck. He ignores the fine tremors electrifying Rodney’s body and lets Rodney press his broad hand into the narrow of John’s back, lets Rodney calm him, be strong for him, do this for him because it’s always easier to be strong for someone else. 

+++

The first time they make it to a bed – this would be the second time they have sex, because they’re not twenty-five anymore and muscles ache more readily now, skin bruises more easily – John lets Rodney push him onto Rodney’s billowing down comforter, rich against his skin. They're both completely naked. Rodney straddles him down around his knees and looks at him. John is bare before him.

It’s not as though John’s been celibate during these long years. When he was in his twenties, he was called cutie, somewhat snidely but with a certain wicked appreciation for the preppy looks he couldn’t manage to shed entirely, not even in uniform. He aged out of this, aided by his own half-assumed, half-disillusioned fuck-you attitude, aided also by command in Atlantis. He knows that there has always been someone there willing to take him up on a suggestive look, and unlike Rodney, he hasn’t tried a serious relationship. 

He’s always liked fully or partially clothed sex, the allure of the half-revealed, the hidden and forbidden. He likes the implication that there is something more, something waiting for him under someone else’s clothes, and he doesn’t want to take off their clothes and find nothing more, doesn’t want them to strip him and find that he’s the one who has nothing else to give. 

On Rodney’s bed, cushioned by the softness of his comforter and enveloped by his familiar scent all around, John finds himself trying to spread wider for Rodney’s eyes. They’re sharp and clever and see everything, and it never occurs to John to want to cover himself.

One of his earliest fantasies about Rodney takes place in the city. He is standing back in the shadows watching Rodney with his lover. Rodney’s hands are tight on the other man, one behind his head, the other on his face. At the same time, the lover’s hands are slipping up his back, and then they’re still, motionless, no, in motion, twisting fabric, stroking. Together they curve into Atlantis’s side, and that’s when John’s back hits the city’s wall and he knows that he’s been watching himself with Rodney and that this fantasy takes place in Atlantis, against its skeleton, not because John dreams about that but because he’s always known how Rodney’s felt about the city. Rodney reaches inside his clothes and John says “yes” in a choked voice, and John who is watching looks away until he hears himself say, “Oh, god, Rodney.” When he glances back Rodney has aligned their bodies so that they can rock together. One hand clutches at John; the other is braced against the city. 

John was over fifteen years younger then. So was Rodney. Rodney didn’t carry the extra weight around his waist. John’s belly didn’t sag inward when he slouched. He can’t bench what he could, nor run a mile quite so fast. But when Rodney looks down at him lying in his own blankets, naked, for a long moment, John relaxes and looks back. And when Rodney bends down and touches him slowly, John leans into it. Rodney runs warm hands over his sides, flanks, the inside of his elbow, the hollow at the base of his throat. It’s almost not sexual, except for the part where John’s cock is harder than it’s been in years. Rodney hums low, pleased, and John finds that, after all, he is naked and that under his clothes there really was nothing else to give Rodney because he gave it all to this man a long time ago. 

+++

Nine months, four check-ins, and two trips back to Earth later, John surfaces from a feverish bout and finds Rodney right there sitting on the edge of his bed, ignoring his almost complete ZPM. A real ZPM, not the babies Rodney’s still been making to date, because things always take longer than you expect, or just as long as you have to give them. John croaks, “Hey, you don’t have to take care of me. You didn’t sign up for this.” 

Rodney smacks the top of his head and says, “I gave up my Nobel for you. I think I can handle this.” 

John smiles and squirms until his head rests on Rodney’s leg and doesn’t say anything. 

The second day back in Atlantis, Rodney disappears. John figures he’s off in his old lab or down in the ZPM chamber checking the baby-baby they plugged in yesterday. He ends up unpacking most of their stuff because it bothers him not to have it all in order. They’ve taken a few rooms next to the transporter closest to the gate room. John chose the location yesterday. “If the transporter breaks, this is the least distance to cover to the gate on foot.” 

Rodney says, “Yes, yes, whatever,” and, “If we confine ourselves to the gateroom, the ZPM chamber, a few labs, and these rooms, the current ZPM will maintain the shields for a month. If we weren’t here, it would be able to last another couple thousand years.”

John’s eyebrows shoot up. 

“Life support takes a lot of power! Anyway,” Rodney says, “we should take it out and put in the little one we brought so that if—” his mouth turns down – “we can’t make more ZPMs, then we can still leave the city with something.” 

On this, their second day, John doesn’t see Rodney until the mid afternoon. He checks on the control chair and the stock of drones; scans the entire city for life signs that shouldn’t be there; makes a list of the first planets to visit so that they can get fresh produce and hopes that these planets are still there to visit, still inhabited, knowing that some of them won’t be; and makes a separate list of likely planets that Ronon and Teyla might be on. He compiles another list of their old contacts that might know something about them, and draws up alternate plans for how to find them depending on whether they’re still together or if they’ve split up. 

Rodney finds him standing at one of the great windows. The city, of course, remains underwater deep in the pit of this new Atlantic ocean. Beyond the window is murky, all browns and greys. “It should be black, shouldn’t it,” Rodney says with a smug quality to his voice. Smug because—

John glances at him. “We knew it wasn’t.” 

“I hate that it’s buried down here.” He shakes his head. “We don’t have the power yet to bring it up.”

“Not to mention the security risk. It’s safer down here.” Rodney’s looking at him askance. “For the city. I’m not talking about us.”

This makes Rodney roll his eyes. “Of course you’re not worried about your own safety. But, John, you’re not thinking big enough. For once. As soon as I make the ZPMs, we’ll have real power, full power, more than we ever had. As much as the Ancients had. Enough to cloak the city once it’s on top of the ocean.” He grins at John, energized by the power of his dreams. 

John can’t help but grin back. “Better get to it, then.” He resigns himself to a lot of time alone for the next few months and plots how to convince Rodney to let him go off-world without him, although he’s not sure he wants to leave him alone in the city, either. Safer to go together, but they’re going to need a break from each other, too.

“Well, you’re going to help,” Rodney tells him in his moron voice. “I need your gene, your hands – just. You have to help me.” Then, abruptly, “Come on.”

Rodney takes him down to the jumper bay. John hasn’t paid a visit here yet. He’s been waiting until they go off-world through the gate. They’re so far under the ocean that a jumper’s shields won’t be able to hold back the pressure. The city rests substantially further down than Rodney had, when, back on Lantea, he crashed under the ocean. 

“Uh,” Rodney says, “this is me we’re talking about. I did the calculations for this months ago, before we even had a go. All I had to do this morning was implement the changes. I modified Jumper One’s shields. They’ll hold until we get to the surface.”

John stares at him. Something is sparking low in his belly, growing, excitement and all the desire for flight that he’s pushed down relentlessly ever since the fevers grounded him on Earth. 

Rodney makes a shooing motion. “Go on, then. The hatch is open.”

“But you have to work on the ZPMs.” It’s the only thing John can think to say. 

“Oh my god, how stupid are you.” Rodney puts his hands on John’s shoulders. “John. I think you’re a suicidal pea-for-brains because any sane, smart person wouldn’t be flying in your condition. I don’t care if you don’t have a fever right now and are fine – you never know when another one will hit and take you down. And I know you think the jumpers won’t fail you, won’t let you crash because, I don’t know, they’re psychic or something and will somehow divine that all your feverish mental flailing around really means that you want to land nice and soft on a big patch of grass.”

He pauses. “But. That’s all part of you.” If Rodney had asked John to stay on the ground, for his own sake, to preserve his own life, John probably would have. By now, Rodney probably knows this, too. 

He says, “Let’s go. The rest can wait. Take me for a ride.”

For the second time in an hour, John grins wide and says, “Holy shit,” and grabs the sides of Rodney’s head and brings it down just enough so that John can press a great, big smacking kiss to the center of his forehead.

“I think I at least deserve a blow job out of this,” Rodney grumbles.

“All you can handle, baby,” he drawls, and licks his lips slowly. “Later.”

They joyride the jumper. The first shoot up through the heavy water is glorious, the way the jumper breaks cleanly into the air, up into the atmosphere, higher and higher. John gives himself over completely to the Ancient systems, trusting them and his skill to keep them steady. He asks the jumper for more and more and more, and she faithfully gives it to him until they’re skirting the edges of space and the surrounding light of the sun is contracting into a ball of fire and more distant pinpricks of stars, and then John turns the jumper and dives back down in a controlled spiral. He thinks he’s laughing somewhat manically, and dimly he hears Rodney yelling at him, and finally he evens out and sits back in his chair. His heart is racing so hard he can practically see his chest moving, and all his muscles are lax in the aftermath except for his cheeks, which hurt from grinning so hard. 

“Fucking maniac,” sputters Rodney. Somehow his hair is messed and he looks generally disheveled, even though the jumper’s inertial dampeners keep everything smooth even when pulling 16 g. There’s no wind in a jumper. 

“Yup,” John agrees, and then he’s taking off his jacket and tossing it to the ground to bunch under his knees as he bends before Rodney and unzips his pants. Rodney’s cock is hot in his hand, at first soft, now stiffening as John palms him, and the smell of him is spicy, warm. 

“But, the jumper,” Rodney gasps as John sucks him in long, easy with familiarity. John mumbles something about auto-pilot and, “trust her,” around Rodney’s cock and gives himself over to the pulse of Rodney’s body and the unbidden correspondence of his own. Tonight he’ll press his body into Rodney’s, long and slow like there’s no end, like his cock inside Rodney is a heartstring, a sinew between them. When he fucks Rodney, afterwards Rodney always rolls him over or pulls him down and blankets him with the solid give of his body. John craves this. 

The jumper stays on a perfectly even course while he blows Rodney. Wiping his mouth with his hand after and shaking his head at Rodney when he moves to return John’s actions – “Tonight,” John say – he slides back into his chair and guides them over one of the three continents on this planet. 

Then he turns to Rodney and says, “Here, you do it, fly her.”

Rodney tells him, yet again, that he’s crazy. But John cajoles and pleads, and in the end Rodney flies. He warps linear geometry in the air, his line so crooked that it’s not a line at all. “It’s been over twelve years since I flew anything!” he protests indignantly. 

John tells him that he is the freaky butterfly that twists and turns all over the place, not going forward, not going backward, until Splat! it’s smashed right into a windshield. Rodney takes offense at being called a butterfly. John considers being sick, except that this is a jumper with all those inertial dampeners and also he’s a hotshot pilot who can pull 10 g without batting an eyelash, without a flinch but only a whoop at the madness of it all. Instead he thinks with something that resembles a twenty-year-old’s glee, “Hotshot pilot!” and looks at Rodney.

Rodney is gazing down at the wide swatch of the ocean beneath them. He brings up the HUD, ignoring his erratic flight path, and points at it, at the dot that is Atlantis far under the ocean, and he says, “This is going to be it someday. The city – we’re going to raise it up out of there again. It’s going to shoot to the surface just like us in this jumper now. I will see it happen, John,” and he says it, so John knows he will. “I will make it rise up.” 

Glory that has no end, John thinks, and he squeezes Rodney’s thigh and leaves his hand there. He turns his thoughts to the jumper, pleading with it to speak up for Rodney, to let him hear the clarion call of its song, its homing beacon to Atlantis. A few minutes later, Rodney is humming, not a perfect voice, but perfect pitch, and it’s exactly the song John hears in his head, too. 

“My hero,” Rodney says, sarcastically and absolutely in earnest, and John has to press back against the jumper’s seat against the hot, expansive feeling in his chest.

+++

Rodney won’t give any of his science to the SGC. He won’t tell them how to build a ZPM. He won’t divulge his math or his physics or his materials or his process. They know only generalities, the basics he was working on before he quit the program. “Yes,” he snaps at them, “before I die, I’ll make sure you get the information. Even if I’m in Atlantis when I die,” and John’s pretty sure he plans to be. “I’ve set up systems. You’ll know. Unless you try to steal one of my computers or hack into them remotely, because then you’ll never get a thing. Because, yes, my spite really would be that strong.” Also, he must know that if that ever happened and John survived him, eventually John would spill the beans, not for the SGC or the IOA, but for the sake of Earth and all her people. 

“As long as we have the knowledge, they have to leave the gate open for us. Anyway, it’s not like I’m just going to hand them a dozen ZPMs.”

It’s not that Rodney believes that the generals and the IOA are out to get him, them. That they’re going to shut that door or harm them in anyway. It’s merely that, even if it was John who made the call in the end, Rodney still bears the scars of leaving his city in the first place. John traces them with his knuckles and his mouth, down the course of Rodney’s naked body. They’re fading, now, under Atlantis’s quiet blue light. 

In three months, they have to report back to the SGC. The plan is for them to come and go from Earth to Pegasus as needed. Keller doesn’t want them living in the city permanently with no medical care and only themselves, deep under the ocean. “I don’t care how much artificial sunlight the city can provide you with. It’s not the same. And you need more human interaction than that. It’s not healthy.” She doesn’t budge. John’s grateful. He has to make sure Rodney doesn’t turn into some sort of cave-dwelling crustacean, and he himself doesn’t want to live forever in a ghost town, even if it is hard to think about these things in the midst of the anticipation of returning. 

Eventually, of course, the city itself will run out of the raw materials that Rodney uses to create the ZPMs. They’ll have to figure out how to manufacture new materials, as a small but necessary percentage of the stuff the Ancients used to make the ZPMs are not naturally occurring or made by any known processes. Even Rodney admits that he has no idea what they’re made up of, much less how. “That’s why I had to take apart a jumper. To steal them. It was the only thing we had on Earth that contained large enough amounts. I can recognize them, but that’s as far as I go.”

John hates these conversations. On Earth when they occur he mostly stares at the cement of the SGC or the shuddering trees of Rodney’s island; in the city, he looks out the windows at the great brown-grey nothingness of the sea. He knows the water is always in motion, that currents stir her depths, but all water looks the same and it’s hard to tell that from inside, unless something floats past. Finally he looks at Rodney, hard, and says, firmly, “That’s not your problem.”

“Yes and no,” Rodney protests. “Look, someday—”

“No. When is someday? What’s eventually? This is not your problem.” John wills Rodney to agree with him, to lie if he has to, because John knows that lies have a way of becoming the truth. He didn’t join the Air Force to fly, after all. 

Rodney is silent a long moment as he watches John. “Okay,” he finally says, and John is startled, but he only says, “Okay, then. Let’s go find Teyla and Ronon.”

“Ah.” Rodney glances away. “About that.”

+++

About seven years after they get back to Earth, Rodney says to him, “I used to hate you for being a soldier.”

Rodney has a knack for timing these kinds of statements: John is in his dress uniform after attending a formal song-and-dance required of him. He’s only recently back from overseas, Rodney only just off a brief jaunt on the Fortuna. Outside John’s apartment, the first snowflakes are falling, and he’s not sure if he wants to punch McKay or just, well, punch him. 

“I thought you could be more, see.”

John doesn’t say anything. He turns on the TV and goes into the kitchen to grab a beer. There’s a game on. He takes off his jacket and spreads it over the back of a chair. Rodney follows him into the living room, into the kitchen, back into the living room, and finally sighs. An exaggerated sigh, John thinks meanly. 

“For crying out loud. I’m trying to say I was wrong. Honestly! You are so passive aggressive.”

Oh. Well in that case. John glances over at him. “There’s beer in the fridge, McKay.”

+++

“So here’s the thing,” Rodney says. He’s boiling noodles on the Ancient stove-thing that the expedition found years ago and left in the city after they were recalled to Earth. “Before Ronon and Teyla left, I might have designed a transponder for each of them. Initially I made them to be implanted into the skin so they would never lose them, and I was going to have Keller put them in. But you know how Ronon can be about inserting things under his skin, not that I blame him because if I’d had a Wraith tracker in my back for seven years, I might be a bit twitchy about it, too. I think he made a little container for his and braided it into his hair. I don’t know what Teyla did with hers.”

“McKay.” John sits very still, tight with nervy impatience at what’s coming out of Rodney’s mouth.

“Right, right, getting on with it. The device can only be activated by another device, which I have with me. My controller will send out a beacon and if either of the corresponding devices is in range, then they activate. Just a faint vibration, nothing that would distract them if the transponders go off at a bad moment. And if they go off, then Ronon and Teyla will know to come to Atlantis.”

He looks at John, wide-eyed and excited and a little apprehensive. 

John looks back and says, “Your noodles are boiling over,” stupidly, because god. Rodney. 

“Can we turn it on from here?”

“We could, but it won’t do much good unless they’re in this solar system, which I doubt they are. The range is, galactically speaking, fairly limited. We still have to visit a lot of planets. But it’s something?”

John laughs. “Then let’s haul some ass.” He’s ready to get out there.

He writes Ronon and Teyla one last mental letter. 

Hi, guys. We’re back. We’re looking for you now. Every planet we go to Rodney activates the beacon for the transponder. I hope you both have whole families now. I want to meet them.

He stops writing to think. It’s harder now that they’re closer, harder to spill his secrets.

Okay, so my mother wanted to name me Clementine but, in what might have been the one really kind thing my father ever did for me, he wouldn’t let her. Because, and I’m not sure he knew this, if you name something, then it’s real. You create it, you control it. And for years, all my life, I wanted something more, and at times in Atlantis with you guys and McKay, with all my soldiers, and then back on Earth too – sometimes I knew there was something more that I was looking for. Something really big. 

John scratches all this out. It’s too obvious. He tries again:

Rodney thinks that I think that I’ve abandoned my people by coming back here with him. It stresses him out. I think he’s in denial because if he looked at it my way and saw that by doing this, I’m trying to help every single person on Earth by helping create the power to protect them, well, that would probably give him a heart attack. So I let him think that I’m doing this for him, and he thinks that he’s doing it for me, and we’re both a lot more selfish than that, bastards the two of us, and it works. 

He crosses this out too. Finally he just says:

One day, soon, the gate is going to dial and we’re going to receive your old codes, and you’re both, together or singly, going to step through the gate. We’ll be here waiting; I’m expecting you. I promised Rodney you’d come, and he promised me the same thing. So hurry up already. 

+++

There is a day that is bright and hot, adrift from time and space. Rodney’s dragged John to an air show under the late summer sun. The grass is dry and browned, and everybody’s jockeying for positions on the field. Children with sticky fingers and parents dragging pails of food and blankets, old men in short-sleeved thin button-downs with their folding chairs, middle-aged men with beer bellies and coolers – “You totally want their trucks, don’t you?” Rodney mutters under his breath, which makes John bump his shoulder and secretly curl his finger under the hem of his shirt to find a soft patch of skin. It’s slightly damp with sweat.

As the first fighter screams overhead, causing the crowd to jump to its feet cheering despite all its preparations to sit, Rodney to wince, and John to shade his eyes over his aviators and relax bonelessly even while standing, John thinks that it was never about getting back to Atlantis or the Pegasus, not for him, not even for Rodney. It was about this, this touch between them, Rodney’s pinky overlapping his on their scratchy blanket pulled from the bed of John’s truck. “I do not have truck envy,” he tells Rodney, and “I could so fly that,” as he points to the sky and watches the thunderbirds cross over and under. He loves his jumpers, hell yeah, but for sheer exhilaration of motion, they can’t compare to the pull and burn of a fighter jet. Rodney says he’s going to combine Ancient systems with the F-302 so that John can fly them again. “When I have time,” he says, and John responds, “No rush.”

After the show, John goes over to look at the planes, to run his hand over their flanks and bellies, and to get close he has to introduce himself as Colonel Sheppard, USAF. Maybe he’s retired already, maybe he’s still active. Ground personnel snap to attention at him, and the pilots, too, when they dismount, and he salutes back, soldier.

Someday, perhaps soon, another expedition will be sent to Atlantis, which Rodney will hate and love, and which John will allow because the city was never his concern, only his people, only Rodney. He sits here with Rodney under a hot Californian sun, the shriek of fighter jets overhead; there with Rodney, feet dangling over the edge of the pier, over the blue, blue surface of the ocean. To the east is the stargate and to the sky are their starships in geosynchronous orbit, and in every direction, because there is no direction in space, is their city transfigured with the glow of its ZPMs, and he is what Teyla named them all so long ago, child of foreign stars, John.


End file.
